Kali Malone – All Life Long
US composer Kali Malone returns with an album that seeks to wrest devotional music from its religious connotations
Last year composer Kali Malone was forced to cancel her concert at the Church Saint-Cornély in France after far-right protesters deemed her performance to be "profanatory”. You could argue they were right. After all she does harness sounds associated with religious worship for her own secular purposes. Passage Through the Spheres, the opening track of her latest album is a great example of this; a liturgical chant performed by the vocal group Macadam Ensemble, whose lyrics are adapted from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay In Praise of Profanation.
Malone’s rebellious sensibility, particularly in relation to the interplay between the sacred and the profane, continues throughout All Life Long. Exploring the effect devotional drones have on believers and non-believers alike, pieces written for brass and pipe organ weave in and out of harmonic stability as various textures and patterns re-emerge across the album. Certain songs are resurrected too, like the titular composition which appears first as an organ piece that surrounds the listener in a funereal fog, only to resurface later as a choral canon based on Arthur Symons poem The Crying Water. The cumulative effect is sublime and will leave even the most agnostic listener in a state of transcendental bliss.
Listen to: All Life Long (for organ), No Sun To Burn (for brass), Moving Forward