Bleep

There is an inherent timelessness to much of drone music, made for meditation and immersion, for getting lost in and losing sense of the hours passing by. Kali Malone leans into these ideas with a far more emotional perspective, taking her longform compositional sensibilities to new heights on her latest album Does Spring Hide Its Joy. The composer and performer links up with Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar to create richly evolving and fluctuating tones that blend together over its three hour runtime, documenting Malone’s blurry temporal experiences.

Created in March and May 2020, Does Spring Hide Its Joy shows a different side to a season usually characterised by blossom, light, and reawakening. Fuelled by the profound stillness of lockdown, Malone teases a pronounced darkness out from the edges of these sonorous textures, conjuring the nascent steps out of Winter where fog presides over dewy blades of semi-frozen grass. Tension grows and releases in waves, instruments subtly warp with force and elegance as Malone patiently ekes out all possible sounds and feelings.

These pieces maximise space with their minimal origins. Strings that once whispered become bellowing stormy seas, in the same breath singing, groaning, whistling, and chirping. From a lulling tranquillity comes lacerating vibrations, forming a monolith of sound where each instrument merges like the nebulous days of that fateful Spring. Deep rumbles rise up in the final throes of ‘v2.3’ as the jagged edges of electronic tones and mesmerising cello coalesce completely.

The limited palettes of Does Spring Hide Its Joy contain multitudes of sounds and expressions, an enchanting feat in Kali Malone’s artistic evolution.