Kali Malone: Burning Song

UPEND Presents

Kali Malone: Burning Song

Kali Malone returns to The Great Organs at First Congregational Church in Los Angeles – one of the largest church organs in the world – to perform Burning Song, her new album for pipe organ, cello and guitar featuring Lucy Railton and Stephen O’Malley. The program also includes select compositions from Malone’s vast organ discography.

Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. The music moves through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Feeling supersedes matrices, as each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy.

Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of introspection and unwavering tenderness. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of her organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before.

Kali Malone is a composer and musician primarily working with pipe organ, chamber ensembles, and electroacoustic formats. Her music is patient and focused, built on evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods and historical tuning systems become portals to new ways of perceiving harmony, structure, and introspection.

She has performed at venues including Lincoln Center, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris, Thomaskirche Leipzig, Southbank Centre, Bozar, La Maison Symphonique, Unsound Festival, and Primavera. Her work has been commissioned by the Venice Biennale, Pinault Foundation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Lafayette Anticipations, and INA GRM.

In parallel with her solo work, Malone maintains an active collaborative practice and has worked with musicians including Drew McDowall, Stephen O’Malley, Lucy Railton, Caterina Barbieri, Macadam Ensemble, Leila Bordreuil, and Ellen Arkbro.

Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone and experimental music groups for over two decades, with SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate among his best-known creations. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity, and multidisciplinary interests.

His work includes collaborations with a wide range of artists, including Scott Walker, Kali Malone, Alvin Lucier, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, authors Dennis Cooper and Alan Moore, Peter Rehberg, Fujiko Nakaya, and Jim Jarmusch, as well as experimental music research centers IRCAM, INA GRM in Paris, and EMS in Stockholm. O’Malley has toured extensively around the world since 2000. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism, sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.

Lucy Railton is a British cellist, composer, and cross-disciplinary collaborator whose practice reflects an endlessly innovative and restless approach to the cello and artistic self-expression. She has released solo and collaborative albums on labels including Modern Love, PAN, ECM, GRM/Editions Mego, and Ideologic Organ.

As a performer and collaborator, Railton has contributed to major works with artists including Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, Akram Khan, Peter Zinovieff, Simon Fisher Turner and the Derek Jarman Estate, Phill Niblock, and Beatrice Dillon. She regularly performs works by composers including Catherine Lamb, Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone, Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis, alongside touring her own solo work internationally. Recent solo projects include Not A Word From Me and Blue Veil.

Event venue & nearby stays

First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, 540 South Commonwealth Avenue, Los Angeles, United States

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