The composer channels a fresh surge of energy under the aegis of the Leipzig master, aided by a virtuoso cello and Sunn O)))’s acoustic guitar.
A few weeks after presenting the choral work Abounds in All Things at the Bourse de Commerce, a commission for the Paris museum, the American composer returns to her recording career and to her first love: the organ. Initially commissioned by the Venice Biennale of Music in 2023, the project has grown with three new pieces that now form Burning Song, Kali Malone’s ninth album. A singular title to signal the impermanence of these pieces, the fluidity of their sequence where each piece, through a process of combustion, influences the next.
Burning Song is Kali Malone’s first contemporary composition written for the Bach organ, designed in 2000 for the Church of St. Thomas in Leipzig where the German composer’s body rests, and Malone’s piece does not bow to the weight of classicism.
Burning Song Evokes the Spatial Atmosphere of the Church
Always accompanied by cellist Lucy Railton and Stephen O’Malley from Sunn O))) on acoustic guitar, she even finds in this otherworldly patronage a fresh breath. Meticulously recorded in a back-and-forth between the innards of her instrument of choice and the architecture of the building, Burning Song makes the church’s space felt and, by extension, its mystique that threads into the intimate core of these pieces to the point of being almost damned.
Burning Song (Ideologic Organ). Release on October 30.
