Kali Malone’s latest, Living Torch, is balm for the world-weary soul.
And who isn’t at least a touch world-weary these days.
Moving with glacial pace and feeling even larger, Living Torch’s electroacoustic sound world is a thing of constant shifting mystery and wonder, feeling as if it slowly seeps into every corner, every nook, cranny and crevasse of the listening room and the listener over the coarse of its 33-minute journey.
Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities.
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‘Living Torch’ was composed in Paris between 2020 and 2021 and played on trombone, bass clarinet, sine wave generators, Éliane Radigue’s own ARP 2500 modular synthesizer(!), and the Boîte à bourdons (bumblebee box), a custom-made motor-powered drone instrument inspired by the hurdy-gurdy and the Indian shruti box.
If you’re yearning to get back in touch with natural time—breath, heartbeat, and the course of the sun—jump into Living Torch with both feet and let everything else fall into its pace.