Malone Kali – Burning Song

Kali Malone's Burning Song is her first new album since 2024's All Life Long, and it places her music in unusually charged surroundings: the record was made at Leipzig's Thomaskirche, where J.S. Bach spent the last 27 years of his life. Malone became the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church's Bach Organ, a modern instrument built with baroque-informed tuning and temperament, giving these pieces a distinctly historical frame without making them feel academic.

What stands out here is the shift in method. The sources describe Burning Song as more intuitive and direct than Malone's recent work, with chord progressions unfolding slowly and organically rather than through more overtly systematic design. Lucy Railton's cello and Stephen O'Malley's bowed acoustic guitar are central to that effect: this is the same trio heard on Does Spring Hide Its Joy, and their deep-listening rapport lets the music move between ambiguity, melancholy and sudden brightness without ever breaking its concentration.

The album also brings together pieces from different moments in its making. Its first half began as a commission for the 2023 Venice Music Biennale, with early ideas worked out backstage at Bozar in Brussels, while the final three pieces were written quickly ahead of the August 2025 recording sessions. That mix of long gestation and late urgency gives Burning Song a special balance of patience and immediacy, beautifully summed up by the closing "My Eve My Dawn," where Malone links sadness and joy in one continuous, quietly luminous arc.

Reviews

• another sombre masterpiece - The Guardian