20 Questions with Kali Malone

The composer and musician on the transcendent properties of music-making and how revenge is a dish best served with two scoops of gelato

It feels impossible to write about the work of Kali Malone without reaching for the grandest of terms and ideas. Her output is of huge scale and ambition, and it is thrillingly unfussed about adhering to the conventional bounds of most music.

Over the past few years the Stockholm-based Coloradan has built a reputation as one of the most exciting experimental musicians in the world. Her discography incorporates dark ambient, drone and choral forms, each recording pushing listeners into a musical terra incognita where recognisable sound signatures are purposely de-emphasised. In their place are impressionistic tones, textures and harmonies. Put simply, if you ever want to listen to something that makes you feel like you’re hovering an inch above the ground whilst moving at a thousand miles an hour, Kali’s got you covered.

Malone’s brilliantly transportive new album, Burning Song, was recorded in St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, using the Bach Organ – an instrument completed in 2000 and titled in honour of its namesake, who served as a musical director of the space in the first half of the 1700s. On the recording, Malone is joined by British cellist Lucy Railton and Sunn 0))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley – likeminded souls who inherently understand the restraint and nuanced instrumental articulation her pieces require. Shortly before the release of the new LP, Malone took some time out to answer 20 questions for AnOther.

1. What is your earliest memory?

Picking all of the neighbour’s tulips to give my mom, then returning them in tears.

2. What makes you happy?

Singing and riding bikes.

3. What makes you sad?

Paralysis.

4. What is the best part of the songwriting experience?

Right before a song emerges, when it’s pure boundless, burning potential.

“I swear he [Bach] whispered in my ear and fixed the music” – Kali Malone 

5. Speaking of which, your new album is entitled Burning Song. What is the most important thing for people to know about it?

I somehow got the keys to the most sanctified classical music institution and made an album of precious songs with my beloved collaborators on top of Bach’s grave in the dead of night.

6. Can you tell us about the relevance of the album’s title?

It combines destruction and creation.

7. How would you classify the music on the album? Do you consider it music in the classical tradition, or is it purely experimental?

I am not a classically trained organist coming from the Bach tradition. As an outsider in that very conservative world, I often claim the experimental musician card. It gives me the liberty to obscure the codes and find my own path.

8. You recorded Burning Song on the Bach Organ. What can you tell us about the history of the instrument?

It’s a historical replica of an organ built by JS Bach’s uncle, an instrument he was heavily influenced by as a child and referenced throughout his life. The replica is built by one of my favourite living organ builders Gerald Woehl. He also built an organ in northern Sweden that I recorded on my album The Sacrificial Code. I’ll take any chance to play his instruments.

9. The organ uses a “bespoke tuning and temperament system”. Can you explain what that means?

Temperament is how you divide the octave to create the intervals between the notes, establishing precise frequency relationships that characterise the personality of the harmony. We take it for granted now, but before equal temperament became widely standardised in the 19th and 20th centuries, there were many types of temperaments that had drastically different emotional effects. This is all important to me because I see tuning as a fundamental extension of artistic expression.

10. Aside from his professional connection, JS Bach is buried in St Thomas’s. Did it weird you out having that kind of musical history attached to the space?

Playing there alone at night was actually quite comforting. I swear he whispered in my ear and fixed the music a few times. But these historical churches carry complicated and traumatic histories beyond the music. There’s beauty and violence held in the same space, and it can be intense to reckon with that. I have my own techniques for navigating it. Once I commit to the music, I can create a kind of psychic forcefield and transform that pain into something that breathes with relief. As a kid, I was always afraid of going down into basements until I figured out that nothing could get me as long as I was singing.

11. What’s your best on-stage experience?

One preserved memory was performing my album All Life Long at Lincoln Center in New York. I was conducting a crescendo of brass musicians extending the final ecstatic chord of my organ piece No Sun To Burn. I turned around from the console to face the musicians who were positioned in the darkness and slowly raised my arms out wide over the course of five minutes. As the brass grew louder and louder it felt like we were edging towards sublime collapse. I sensed my family in the audience, my eyes and cheeks were wet.

12. What’s your weirdest on-stage experience? 

I was playing an electronic show in an active crematorium in the most haunted cemetery in Chicago. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into until I showed up for soundcheck and was taken to my green room, which was a mausoleum in the basement next to the cremator. My modular synth was broken and I was preoccupied with a screwdriver, so I didn’t really clock where I was until a hearse rolled up. We brought my gear to the altar using the coffin elevator and raised my table to standing height with fire-resistant bricks, generously supplied by the crematorium workers. I was playing in the middle of a thunderstorm in front of a giant American flag and the chapel was strobing with lightning. The acoustics were so bizarre and hallucinatory, I was completely possessed while playing. Afterwards, I found a soaking wet security guard searching the mausoleum with a flashlight. He thought someone was in there, and explained he was clairsentient, coming from a long lineage of clairvoyant family members. He was all shaken up and I gave him some chocolate.

13. What’s the best piece of advice you have ever been given?

[Portishead singer and lyricist] Beth Gibbons told me “better done than perfect”. It stung the first time and still makes me shudder.

14. What is your worst nightmare?

Not being able to save the people I love.

15. What are you most proud of?

Moving to the other side of the world [to Stockholm], alone as a teenager.

“Music has always been my inner companion. It’s not a career choice, but a necessity” – Kali Malone 

16. Most treasured possession?

My Swedish passport.

17. What is your greatest hidden skill?

My sense of direction, although I’m sure some friends would beg to differ.

18. What’s the most satisfying act of vengeance you’ve ever enacted?

Smashing a double scoop of gelato into a misogynist’s face. 

19. If you weren't a musician what would you be?

Music has always been my inner companion. It’s not a career choice, but a necessity. Ten years ago I slipped while climbing up some rocks in Stockholm and broke my jaw in a few places, including the small bone that connects to the ear. My hearing temporarily disappeared upon impact, and in the shock of the moment, I feared I’d never be able to make music again. I saw this alternate reality of having to move back to the Rocky Mountains, live in my dad’s basement, be a caretaker by day and drive a snowcat by night.  

20. Are there any mantras you live by?

I live by my music.

Burning Song by Kali Malone is released 30 October by Ideologic Organ