Kali Malone sets Burning Song, her first solo album in two years

Kali Malone has announced Burning Song, her first album of solo compositions since All Life Long in 2024, and previewed it with the track Heavy With Fruit. The record was made in a church in Leipzig with two collaborators and an instrument that has only recently been opened to contemporary music.

That instrument is the Bach Organ at the Thomaskirche, the church where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor for the last 27 years of his life. The organ was completed nearly three decades ago with bespoke tuning and temperament systems built on baroque practice, and Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on it.

She did not record alone. Lucy Railton plays cello across the album and Stephen O'Malley plays bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that made Does Spring Hide Its Joy in 2023. The sessions ran over two nights last August, with engineer Francesco Donadello placing more than 20 microphones through the room and near the instruments so that a listener could, as the release puts it, locate themselves inside the music.

The album's title carries a double meaning, according to Jonathan Williger's liner notes. Fire, he writes, moves in ways that appear intuitive, changing shape moment by moment and remaining relentlessly insistent, which describes a shift in Malone's method away from mathematical structure toward feeling. Burning is also a process of change that spreads from one point and consumes what it meets.

Burning Song runs to seven pieces: Grieving Figure, Map The Path, Bells On A Branch, Crawling Ashore, Sounding A Void, Heavy With Fruit and My Eve My Dawn. Ideologic Organ releases it on 30 October.

Malone has kept a steady output between solo records, with Magnetism alongside Drew McDowall and Music for Intersecting Planes with Leila Bordreuil both arriving since All Life Long, and a reissue of The Sacrificial Code in between. The new album is her return to writing alone, even with two players in the room, and it sits on the release calendar with the rest of the autumn's electronic releases.