Kali Malone @ Glasgow Cathedral, 21 Jun

In many ways, it is the most obvious thing in the world: take Kali Malone, the composer and great young hope of ecclesiastically inclined organ pieces and place her at the seat of Glasgow Cathedral's nearly 150-year-old organ. Well, the curatorial duo Cento have done just that as part of Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art. Performing pieces from her 2019 masterpiece The Sacrificial Code and this year’s instrumentally experimental All Life Long, Malone's show makes for a truly sublime spectacle – one that subverts gig convention to create a beautiful, singular experience.

Due to where the organ sits in Glasgow Cathedral, Malone performs behind the audience who are left instead to look at the majesty of this building, shed of its usual flurry of tourist and camera flashes, replaced by the hushed reverence of the experimental music fraternity. In place of onstage theatrics or musos muttering among themselves as they try to work out what Malone is playing, we are left to close our eyes or examine the majesty of the cathedral; it means the night is spent in a genuine meditative state. I know ‘meditative’ can often be a kind of synonym for boring, but here it is a literal definition; we sit eyes clamped shut, guided elsewhere by Malone’s playing.

She may be sitting in an awe-inspiring space, playing an incredibly characterful instrument, but it is her compositions that shine through. Malone's playing is gorgeous; huge expanses of glacially shifting chord patterns, weightless but with a sneaky heft to them. Take the title track off Sacrificial Code; it's such a gorgeous thing, the little flutter of a motif that runs through it gives it a feeling of deeply human pleading, even as it ascends into the rafters.

Kali Malone, Glasgow Cathedral, 21 June 2024. Presented by Cento as part of Glasgow International.
Image courtesy Kali Malone and Cento. Photo by Patrick Jameson

But what really brings the performance to superlative heights is the latter half of the set, performed as a duet with Sunn O))) founder, doom legend and Malone’s husband, Stephen O’Malley. These four-handed pieces allow her compositions to further explore the extremities of this organ. What they find is not just its ecstatic highs, but also its churning lows. There is a moment in the late stages of Prisoned on a Watery Shore where the pair slip into a discordant passage, growing from a troubling murk to a full-on cosmic terror the longer it is held, its gurgling low-end throb pulling you into Luciferian pits of tar. It is utterly nightmarish in the best possible way. 

Then... like that... it is finished. It could have been 20 minutes, it could have been four days; time has been utterly mulched. It is a gig that achieves something many aim for, but so few achieve. More emotive than a million earnest singer-songwriters, more genuinely psychedelic than a thousand years of tie-dyed noodling; this is as genuinely ecstatic a gig as they come.