Kali Malone and the Emotional Athleticism of Creativity

Released in 2024, All Life Long was hailed as Malone’s “most ambitious record to date” by The New York Times and “gnawingly beautiful” by The New Yorker. The album, featuring pieces composed for pipe organ, choir ensemble, and brass quintet, took three years to create due to pandemic limitations and the logistics of recording in historic locations across Europe and the U.S. Malone’s mix of choral and instrumental music offers a striking emotional depth, blending her signature style with new vocal elements. The title All Life Long is borrowed from the poem The Crying Water by Arthur Symons and, as Alex Ross writes, “The topic, then, is sorrow, songs of sorrow, sounds of sorrow.”

Malone’s career path, much like her music, illustrates how variability frequently overtakes predictability. From Colorado, her chance encounter with Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro in New York ignited the Rube Goldberg machine that led Malone from an early-college program in Massachusetts to Stockholm, Sweden. Malone relocated to Stockholm in 2012. She is currently based between Stockholm and Paris.

Stephen O’Malley’s commitment to exploration has guided him to create a wide breadth of  multidisciplinary work spanning his career—as a guitarist, composer, art director, and visual artist, among other things. As a teenager in Seattle, O’Malley’s creative spark ignited when he became a member of the Scottish highland bagpipe and drum corps. He has composed and performed in drone doom music groups, creating SUNN O))) which features electric guitar minimalism, a slower tempo that highlights the guitar's reverberation. He has worked with a variety of musicians including Malone, Scott Walker, Alvin Lucier, and now the students from the UMN School of Music. He will join Malone on the organ for the pieces that require four hands.

Malone crafted All Life Long with a blend of brass, organ, and voice that provides a continuously shifting texture, building to moments of anticipated dramatic reverie, then lulling the listener into a dreamy endlessness. The recorded version features choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble, conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame de L'Immaculée Conception in Nantes, France; brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City; and pipe organs from Église Saint-François in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden. The vast range of Northrop’s Aeolian-Skinner organ will allow Malone to experiment with these sonic possibilities in new and dynamic ways. Carefully crafted to complement the melancholic mood, the vocal and brass arrangements will be performed by an ensemble of students studying vocal and brass performance at UMN School of Music.

​In a 2024 interview with France 24, Malone delves more deeply into the creation of All Life Long—with the host describing it as "soothing in a hectic world." The discussion highlights how the album's sonically calming and experimental compositions are deeply rooted in electroacoustic traditions. Malone reflects on the extended period of introspection and composition she experienced during the album's development, which allowed her to deeply engage with language, poetry, and voice. This process not only enriched the album's depth but also reconnected her with her vocal roots, as she had grown up as a vocalist in choir.