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On the 2023 album Does Spring Hide Its Joy, Stephen O’Malley, Lucy Railton, and Kali Malone elongated single chords to colossal proportions. Without regular melodic progression, the ear tends to home in on subtler shifts: slight fluctuations in the timbre of O’Malley’s guitar or the speed of Malone’s oscillators; the sound Railton’s cello makes when her bow reaches the end of its stroke and reverses course. That meditative, enveloping record leveled conventional listening tactics and invited an expansive way of negotiating with time. When change doesn’t come as expected, the present moment has a way of billowing across an infinite horizon.
Malone is a skilled synthesist, but she might be best known for her work with the pipe organ, an instrument that tends to be physically lodged inside gated institutions, difficult to access without a certain degree of finesse. Her 2019 breakthrough LP The Sacrificial Code, a collection of spacious, secular canons, liberated the instrument’s powerful tone from its weighty religious associations. On Burning Song, the Stockholm-based musician’s first new solo album since 2024’s All Life Long, Malone returns to the organ, accompanied once again by Railton and O’Malley. But compared to the majority of her work, which sprawls on the scale of landscapes, the compositions on this new record play out as finely filigreed miniatures. Melodies coil and bubble beneath her careful fingers. Not one track breaks the seven-minute mark.
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The three musicians recorded Burning Song in Leipzig, Germany, at the St. Thomas Church, where J.S. Bach’s body rests. “There’s a composer buried at the altar, not a saint,” Malone said in a recent interview. “That made it feel like a church for music.” The organ woven into the walls of the church where Bach spent decades as cantor was built in 2000, but its tuning and temperament systems were designed to be faithful to the standards of his lifetime. Malone’s compositions, however, depart from baroque forms. The historical setting of the album’s creation hardly contains it; instead, it becomes a staging ground from which Malone and her collaborators can launch their decidedly contemporary explorations.
This is an album that sets out to unmake its central sound. Rarely does an organ under Malone’s command sound less like an organ than it does here: Braided with O’Malley’s bowed acoustic guitar and Railton’s cello, its breathy voicings mutate and dissipate. Rather than overpower the space, as it might if you were seated before its pipes in St. Thomas’ pews, the organ is scaled proportionally to its stringed companions and merges with them readily. As on Does Spring Hide Its Joy, the question of who is making what sound—of what physical processes generated the music that now floats from a pair of headphones—loses its charge within a few minutes. More interesting is the question of what the sounds are doing to each other, the ways they deform each other, lose their distinctiveness, and become an overarching, atmospheric whole.
Because the album is rich with melody—because the compositions snake so readily from note to note, compared to Malone’s previous works—inklings of narrative start to seep from the foggy passages. “Map the Path” surges, crests, and decays like a trail emerging from and then descending beneath the treeline. The delicate climb of “Crawling Ashore” does indeed evoke the exhausted relief of a bedraggled castaway washed up on a beach, while “Heavy With Fruit” folds up its sumptuous chords like so many velvet curtains peeled back from so many empty stages.
Anticipation shudders throughout Burning Song despite its elegiac core. These songs, mournful as they may sound, keep turning corner after corner, never quite settling even when they fall silent. Certain track titles—“Grieving Figure,” “Sounding a Void”—accentuate the sense that the album speaks to loss and its resulting bewilderment. Its closing composition, the steady and searching “My Eve My Dawn,” curls toward the idea that all endings must ultimately bleed into beginnings. Inside every state of grief hangs a question even more disorienting than the grief itself: What now?
