Burning Song

Burning Song, composer and organist Kali Malone's first new album since 2024's All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is intuitive and direct. The album was recorded at the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life; his body rests beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church's Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 but with bespoke tuning and temperament systems based on historical norms of the baroque period. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O'Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone's work Does Spring Hide It's Joy. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ's upper register.The first half of Burning Song was commissioned for the 2023 Venice Music Biennale and presented at the remarkably ornate San Pietro di Castello. Initial seeds of these pieces were developed on a piano backstage at Bozar in Brussels following a solo electronic performance, long after the audience and staff had departed. The album's final three pieces were composed swiftly in the month preceding the recording session in 2025, their stately progressions emerging within her mind's ear with a sense of ease and inevitability, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. The album's final piece, "My Eve My Dawn," represents a clear vision of this process; foregrounding the cohesion between endings and beginnings, it moves through passages of sadness and joy, the linking tones offering a sense of continuity, and thus of acceptance. The freedom found in the process of composing and realizing Burning Song is one that opens innumerable doors of possibility. In the fertility of ashes grows whatever comes next.