Kali Malone has released Heavy With Fruit, the first piece from her album Burning Song, and the personnel on it are the same three musicians who made Does Spring Hide Its Joy in 2023. Stephen O'Malley plays bowed acoustic guitar, Lucy Railton plays cello, and Malone plays organ.
The recording location does a lot of the work. Burning Song was tracked at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, the church where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor for the last 27 years of his life and where he was subsequently buried. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church's Bach Organ, an instrument completed roughly three decades ago with bespoke tuning and temperament systems modelled on baroque practice.
The sessions ran across two late nights in August 2025. Engineer Francesco Donadello placed more than 20 microphones around the room and close to the instruments, with the stated aim of letting a listener locate themselves inside the space rather than in front of it. On a record built from long tones and slow decay, that decision shapes what the music does.
Heavy With Fruit sits sixth in a seven-track sequence that runs Grieving Figure, Map The Path, Bells On A Branch, Crawling Ashore, Sounding A Void, Heavy With Fruit and My Eve My Dawn. It is the piece Malone chose to introduce the album, and a video accompanies it.
Malone has not been idle between solo records. Since All Life Long in 2024 she has released Magnetism with Drew McDowall and, this year, Music for Intersecting Planes with cellist and composer Leila Bordreuil, while her 2019 organ album The Sacrificial Code was reissued through Ideologic Organ.
Burning Song follows on 30 October 2026 through Ideologic Organ. Malone is touring it in rooms chosen to suit the instrumentation, including two nights at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London on 28 and 29 January, with earlier European dates split between electronic sets and solo organ performances. It is electronic music in the loosest sense of the word, and the release sits on the release calendar.
The facts
- Heavy With Fruit is the lead single from Burning Song.
- Stephen O'Malley plays bowed acoustic guitar and Lucy Railton plays cello.
- It was recorded at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig on the church's Bach Organ.
- Bach served as cantor at the church for the last 27 years of his life.
- Engineer Francesco Donadello used more than 20 microphones across two nights.
- Ideologic Organ releases Burning Song on 30 October 2026.
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