On Burning Song, Kali Malone lays the labour behind transcendence bare

Her compositions seem to unfold at a pace that defies the modern ear. Single notes can stretch to the length of a chart-topper’s chorus. Harmonies shift almost imperceptibly. In dispensing with traditional structures, each record can initially feel like a confrontation.

For those coming off the back of 2024's more immediately striking All Life Long, Malone's new album Burning Song might feel like its rewards are only for the listeners with the patience or knowledge to crack it. But the truth is that you just need to sit with it. Rather than demanding you meet it on its own terms, Burning Song simply invites you to let go of yours. To be enveloped. To be moved.

The album finds Malone in St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, where J.S. Bach was musical director for the last 27 years of his life. It’s an apt setting for a musician whose weapon of choice is the “King of Instruments,” the pipe organ – perhaps the only instrument endorsed by the Catholic Church for lifting up one's mind to higher things.

Here, Malone opts for the church’s own Bach Organ, a Woehl organ built in 2000 but tuned to mirror the Baroque temperaments that might’ve been familiar to the composer himself. The Bach Organ itself looks celestial, like a relief of an angel with its pipes fanning wide like wings ascending to heaven. But she isn’t interested in the organ as a conduit to the divine. It’s about what it can do to us here on Earth.

Like the space in which it was made, Burning Song feels at once monumental and deeply intimate. Malone floods the room while making the listener feel like their sole occupant. The organ’s seemingly endless sustained notes move glacially, like a preacher’s sermon unfolding at an unhurried word a minute, to create something transcendent.

“Sounding A Void”, for instance, resonates so deeply that you can feel your body vibrating. Alongside Lucy Railton’s cello and Stephen O’Malley’s bowed acoustic guitar, the organ fills the void of its title with light. But in all that transcendence, Malone wants you to hear the labour behind it. This is no divine revelation. It’s not something born out of thin air, even if air is precisely what makes this beast sing. This requires effort.

Burning Song is about bringing heaven to Earth. Reclaiming the pipe organ, not as some gift from god, but as a product of human hands, painstakingly shaped from metal. As those sustained notes rattle through the pipes, free of any liturgical traditions, it feels rooted in real emotion, not something abstruse. It’s something most apparent on “Crawling Ashore”. The struggle inherent in the track’s title is at the fore where, amongst the almost mournful dirge, you can hear the clinks and clanks of the machine itself.

At just 40 minutes, Burning Song is a relatively accessible route into her mesmeric works, feeling much less intimidating than Does Spring Hide Its Joy’s sprawling hour-long movements. It might lack the arresting power and beauty of All Life Long or her debut The Sacrificial Code, but there’s a different kind of wonder at work here, that of creation. Malone reminds us that transcendence doesn’t need to be an otherworldly experience. More often than not, the extraordinary emerges from the most tangible things.