KALI MALONE - ALL LIFE LONG

Released: 09/02/24

The US-born, Stockholm-based avant-garde composer Kali Malone’s new record presents her first organ music since 2019’s excellent breakthrough album, The Sacrificial Code – and such is the bravura depth displayed on All Life Long, both compositionally and philosphically (a key text for Malone while conceiving of the album was Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘In Praise of Profanation’) that the three years it took Malone to write and record it actually seems ridiculously quick. 

In addition to the astonishing music performed by Kali Malone and her partner, Sunn 0)))’s Stephen O’Malley, on various historical meantone-tempered pipe organs in Lausanne, Amsterdam and Malmö, All Life Long also features interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass, respectively. Simmering in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation – an example being the titular composition ‘All Life Long’, which appears twice on the album, first as an extended canon for organ, and later as a compactly arranged vocal piece – All Life Long is truly remarkable for the way it reinterprets centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods to create tracks that offer new ways to experience sonically iterative structures.