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Kali Malone, “Does Spring Hide Its Joy” (Ideologic Organ, 2023)

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This latest release from this eternally innovative Stockholm-based composer is a durational tour de force that first began to take shape in empty Berlin concert halls in the early months of the pandemic. While I note with grim humor that the pandemic has itself become an endlessly shifting durational tour de force, Malone’s primary inspiration came instead from the ambient sense of unreality and distorted time that became pervasive as the fabric of normal daily life quickly unraveled. Like many other artists, Malone suddenly found herself with plenty of free time during that period of dread, isolation, and uncertainty, yet she was fortunate enough to get an invitation to record new music at Berlin’s Funkhaus and MONOM and even luckier still to have some extremely talented friends around with newly open schedules themselves. 

In short, the stars were in perfect alignment for one hell of an avant-drone dream team to form, as Malone (armed with 72 sine wave oscillators) tapped in like-minded souls Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton and the expected slow-burning dark sorcery ensued. Does Spring Hide Its Joy feels like an inspired twist on the longform drone majesty of artists like Éliane Radigue, as Malone employed just intonation to layer complex and otherworldly harmonies while her collaborators gamely helped ensure that the crescendos were visceral, gnarled and snarling enough to leave a deep impression.

I have no doubt at all that Kali Malone brought her usual compositional rigor to this “study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns,” but Does Spring Hide Its Joy is more open-ended than her usual fare and leaves some welcome room for spontaneity and improvisation. Malone envisioned the piece as a puzzle of sorts that is assembled from five-minute blocks approximating a ladder that the musicians can choose to ascend or descend. The total number of blocks is fluid as well. For example, the album versions of the piece are an hour long while the live version can sometimes stretch to 90 minutes (note: the CD includes three performances of the piece while the LP includes only two). 

On top of that inventive structure, Malone deliberately wrote the piece with her collaborators’ styles and techniques in mind, envisioning the composition as a “framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement.” In practical terms, that means that this piece is essentially a drone fantasia of bowed strings, smoldering distortion, and shifting harmonies that occasionally blossoms into something more fiery and transcendent. This being a Kali Malone composition, however, the organically evolving harmonies and oscillations are invariably absorbing, sophisticated, and distinctive regardless of the shape the piece takes. Notably, this album is also a bit more earthy, psychotropic and texturally varied than previous Malone opuses. It feels akin to a ghostly ballet or hallucinatory tendrils of smoke, as the sustained tones of the three players languorously intertwine and dissipate in a dreamlike haze of lingering feedback, overtones, and harmonics.

Given the inherently fluidity of that compositional approach, the album’s two or three pieces are essentially variations upon the same theme and the differences between the individual discs or LPs are largely irrelevant. They each unfold differently, of course, but they are essentially the same elements combining at different times (somewhat akin to out-of-phase tape loops). That said, there is an unconventional arc of sorts, as the drones tend to boil over into churning and howling intensity with increased frequency as each part creeps into its second and third movements (though those delineations would be hard to notice without a numbered track list as a reference). 

That said, Does Spring Hide Its Joy feels more akin to watching slow-motion footage of a storm forming at sea than it does a planned composition, as terms like “beginning” or “end” lose all meaning: elemental forces simply gather and dissipate at their own pace and occasionally there are metaphorical flashes of lightning or masses of dark clouds. That fundamentally unpredictability makes for an impressively absorbing listening experience, as each new harmonic development could potentially be the early stages of a howling tempest.

Obviously, experiencing the slow-motion massing of Malone’s otherworldly harmonic clouds right from the beginning is the probably the best way to appreciate the eerie beauty of this album, but Spring is also the sort of piece in which I could drop into its shifting currents at nearly any point and find myself quickly entranced in medias res. That unusual feature did not elude Malone, unsurprisingly, as there is also an installation version of the piece that is coupled with video work from Nika Milano. I am sure I would absolutely love that, as it is doubly immersive to have a cool visual accompaniment while I dissolve into oceanic harmonic bliss, yet Spring is a mesmerizing experience as a stand-alone album too. 

As was the case with previous Malone classics like The Sacrificial Code, what I get out of this album depends largely upon what I put in: deep listening brings deep rewards. My gut feeling is that Spring is destined to topple that previous masterpiece as my personal favorite Malone album, as it is every bit as sophisticated as its predecessor yet has more bite and spontaneity. Then again, maybe I will conclude that I prefer the more focused and minimal pleasures of Malone by herself at a pipe organ. They both have their place, certainly (that place being “heavy rotation”). Regardless of where Spring ultimately lands in my personal Kali Malone canon, I have no hesitation at all about proclaiming this to be yet another brilliant and fascinating statement from an artist on quite an impressive hot streak.

Listen here.

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Elodie, “Vieux Silence” (Ideologic Organ, 2017)

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For their latest album, the duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk (Af Ursin) take an unexpected detour from their impressive run of limited self-released albums for an appearance on Stephen O’Malley’s eclectic Ideologic Organ imprint. To honor this auspicious occasion, the core line-up is fleshed out with returning collaborators Tom James Scott and Jean-Noël Rebilly, as well as pedal steel guitarist Daniel Morris. In all other respects, however, Vieux Silence is every bit a traditional Elodie album, unfolding as a flickering impressionist dream that seems to emanate from a time and place totally unlike our own. As an album, it does not necessarily tower above the rest of Elodie’s consistently fine oeuvre, but the title piece might be the single most achingly gorgeous piece that Chalk and van Luijk have recorded together to date.

As a longtime Andrew Chalk fan, I am hesitant to describe the collaboration of Elodie as greater than the sum of its parts, yet something transcendent undeniably occurs when Chalk and van Luijk get together. To some degree, I can see shades of Chalk’s tender and quietly beautiful drone-based aesthetic and hints of Af Ursin’s shadowy and chameleonic otherworldliness on Vieux Silence, but it feels like such an uncannily seamless blurring of styles that neither artist seems to be steering the ship. At their best, it feels like this album is a séance and Elodie are channeling some kind of gorgeous and languorous music from the spirit realm. The opening “La Vallée Du Sommeil” is a perfect example of such a feat, as its simple and heavenly synth melody seems to vaporously float through a patina of tape hiss like smoke. 

The best reference point that I can conjure is that it resembles what Angelo Badalamenti would probably sound like if he were suddenly taken by The Spirit and started composing rapturous hymns to God rather than collaborating with David Lynch. In fact, the brief piece (“Corridor”) that follows even resembles an organ hymn, though Rebilly’s bittersweet, breathy clarinet melodies inject a bit more soul and harmonic complexity than normally found in such fare. That aesthetic of soulful, unhurried, and simple beauty veiled in a thin fog of unreality reaches its apex with the title piece though, which dreamily pulses and weaves an absolutely gorgeous fantasia of warm chords, gently cascading arpeggios, and a repeating snatch of ghostly vocal melody. It kind of sounds like an achingly beautiful, slow-motion waltz enhanced by a haunted Victrola.

Even when they are not at their best, Elodie remain extremely damn good—the only real difference is simply that the illusion dissipates enough to feel like the work of human musicians with specific instruments playing planned compositions. For example, “La Nuit Voilée” is essentially a fluid and haunting pedal steel solo over a shifting bed of gently stuttering, melancholy chords. 

“Au Point du Jour,” on the other hand, sounds like some sort of missing link between modern classical and Volcano the Bear, blending a slowly tumbling and rippling minor key piano motif with a surreal backdrop of vocal moans, strange breath-generated textures, and some eerily strangled-sounding bird-like whistles. Later, “Le Temps d’Antan” essentially offers up its negative image: a radiant dawn dispelling all of the previous darkness with a lovely piano melody languorously wending its way through a quiet idyll of lingering reverb, soft breezes, and distant birds. 

After all of that elegantly blurred beauty and nuance, however, Vieux Silence nearly ends on bit of a perplexing forceful note, as “Entre Deux Mondes” introduces an ominous and cinematic-sounding string theme that feels like it could have come from just about any skilled soundtrack composer. Fortunately, it eventually segues into a wonderfully dreamlike and spectral finale (“La Saison Blanche”) which feels like two indistinct, supernatural Theremin-like melodies slowly dancing and intertwining over an unpredictable bed of shifting chords and passing shadows of dissonance.

Unsurprisingly, the best pieces on Vieux Silence (“La Vallée Du Sommeil” and “Vieux Silence”) are the ones with the most gorgeous melodies, but the true brilliance of this project lies in the less tangible details. The most significant is probably the duo’s talent for smoky, elusive-sounding textures, elegantly sidestepping the common peril of turning everything into a soft-focus, reverb-swathed blur. Instead, Elodie somehow make their melodies feel a beautiful half-remembered dream: strong and clear, yet still enigmatically obscured by haze and mist. 

A crucial corollary to that is Elodie’s lightness of touch, a delicate balancing act that separates an achingly beautiful unreality from a mere suite of lovely chamber music. Elodie do not always fall on the right side of that equation here, admittedly, but the results are singularly sublime when they do manage to nail it (and I cannot think of many other artists who could even hit that target once). 

Less essential, yet still significant is the duo’s surreptitious harmonic sophistication, as there are almost always shifting harmonic colors hovering all around the main theme and Chalk and van Luijk are not afraid to bring some fleeting shadow to their languorous heaven with flickers and undercurrents of dissonance. More succinctly put: there are some fine compositions here, but it is the masterful and nuanced execution that makes Vieux Silence something far deeper, more mysterious, more layered, and more movingly fragile than the quiet, warmly lovely melodies would otherwise suggest.

Listen here.