Kali Malone: All Life Long

Stockholm-based American composer and organist Kali Malone makes her Northrop and Liquid Music debut with All Life Long, her critically acclaimed album for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet. Malone will perform on Northrop’s iconic pipe organ accompanied by Paris-based musician and artist Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O)))) and choral and brass ensembles comprised of students from the University of Minnesota School of Music.

Malone’s music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Called “gnawingly beautiful” by The New Yorker, the music of All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The blend of  brass, organ, and voice provides a nearly continuous shifting texture, even as familiar themes return. Hidden within are intricate patterns that have the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie, while also lulling the listener into a dreamy endlessness.

Bios

Kali Malone
The works of composer and sound artist Kali Malone implement specific tuning systems in minimalist structures for pipe organ, choir, chamber music ensembles, and electroacoustic formats. Malone’s compositions are rich with harmonic texture through synthetic and acoustic instrumentation in repetitive motions and extended durations, emitting distinct emotive, dynamic, and affective hues which bring forth a stunning depth of focus. 

Malone's recently released albums The Sacrificial Code (2019), Living Torch (2022), Does Spring Hide Its Joy (2023), and All Life Long (2024), quickly rose to international critical acclaim. She has performed extensively, presenting her music at Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Philharmonie de Paris, Radio France, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Grace Cathedral, Southbank Center, Bozar, Schauspielhaus, Unsound Festival, Musica Festival, Berlin Atonal, Moogfest, and Kanal Pompidou, amongst many other museums, contemporary art spaces, concert halls, churches, and festivals throughout Europe, North America, and Australia. Her commissioned work and invited residencies include the Ina GRM, the Venice Biennale, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Lafayette Anticipations, the Richard Thomas Foundation, MACBA, and Elektronmusikstudion. She has collaborated and performed with various artists, including Stephen O’Malley, Lucy Railton, Macadam Ensemble, Frederikke Hoffmeier, Leila Bordreuil, and Drew McDowall.

Originally from Colorado, Malone relocated to Stockholm in 2012. She is currently based between Stockholm and Paris.

Stephen O'Malley
Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone and experimental music groups for over two decades—SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate being among his best-known creations. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity, and multidisciplinary interests. It includes collaborations with a wide range of experimental artists, including Scott Walker, Kali Malone, Alvin Lucier, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, the authors Dennis Cooper and Alan Moore, Peter Rehberg, Fujiko Nakaya, Jim Jarmusch, Johan Johansson, and experimental music research centers IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), EMS (Stockholm), and many others. O’Malley is also a vigorous live performer and has toured around the world since 2000. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism—sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.

"Malone is a poet of attenuation. The compositions on All Life Long proceed at the considered pace of a chess-by-mail match. Each step is a marker of choices made. As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment. To listen closely is to find compositions within, as waveforms meld, tones circle, and patterns shift with a dynamism initially belied by the seeming stasis." —Pitchfork

“The deeply felt lesson of All Life Long is that secular deployment of such resources can itself be a fount of beauty, reflection, and perhaps even revelation.” —Pitchfork

“All Life Long is Malone’s most ambitious work to date. The organ pieces achieve a new degree of harmonic complexity and emotional resonance, while her canons for brass and voice have the meditative elegance of medieval music.” —The New York Times

“All Life Long is slow, hushed, and gnawingly beautiful.” —The New Yorker

“This record lowers the temperature, heightens the sense, slows down life, frame by frame.” —Mojo

Related Links

• Kali Malone
• All Life Long sample
• Stephen O'Malley
• Learn more about Liquid Music
• Northrop’s Aeolian-Skinner Opus 892