Kali Malone: Burning Song review – drone composer wields Bach’s organ to breathtaking effect

In drone world, Burning Song is Kali Malone’s pop record. These pieces are significantly shorter than the lengthy ones that made the US composer’s name, and she takes a newfound emotional approach to composition, forsaking the contrapuntal canon form.

In some arcane land, this probably constitutes unforgivable selling out. In more rational circles, the result is still 40 minutes of beautiful, plaintive tonality, with Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) (also Malone’s husband) on bowed acoustic guitar. Malone plays the Bach organ at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, where the composer was cantor for his last 27 years. Rather than a saint, it’s him who is buried under the altar. “That made it feel like a church for music,” Malone told Blackbird Spyplane.

If Malone’s longer pieces are music to get lost in, the compact forms and liberated mood shifts of Burning Song command acute attention. The trio play in synchronicity, their crackle and breath and scrape simmering intensely. They start Grieving Figure with a sustained note that sounds like a distant ship’s horn, then brightens like blazing final moments of a fierce sunset. Bells on a Branch starts sounding like a swarm of bees and ends utterly parched; Railton’s cello circles ominously amid the drama of Crawling Ashore.

As for emotion, it’s no Max Richter-style lunge for the cheap seats. The heavy opening notes of Map the Path are solemn yet startlingly direct for Malone, feeling for the first time as if she’s lifting her fingers from the keys and shaking the listener by the shoulders.