There are some artists, Kali Malone is one, whose new work I devour, digest, and devour again as if my health depended on it.
From the liner notes:
Choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble and conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L’Immaculée-Conception in Nantes. Brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. Organ music performed by Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs at Église Saint-François in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden.
All Life Long, released today on Ideologic Organ, stretches out over 1 hour and nineteen minutes that feel more like a voyage to new world, familiar yet profoundly beautifully foreign. Ancient and new. This is the kind of music that can move us physically and emotionally, as Malone’s long organ drones entice deeper, slower breaths and deeper, slower thoughts.
More from the notes:
All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across its 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition’s internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony.
This is the kind of music that gives me hope.