Kali Malone (featuring Stephen O'Malley & Lucy Railton)

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

For Kali Malone, a voracious and celebratory appetite for sound and all its micro details greatly informs each movement she makes in her career, and is kneaded deeply, lovingly into her music. With deep knowledge of harmonics and tunings, she is situated not only among the pioneering experimental composers, but within the current scene of heartfelt music theory enthusiasts that follow them. Her work is in conversation with the likes of Eleh and the Important Records crew, as well as previous Bleep album of the year artists Caterina Barbieri and Sarah Davachi.

This album’s collaborators share that love: Lucy Railton has countless credits across the spectrum, from Laurel Halo to Bonobo to Ghostpoet to Mica Levi, on top of her own solo compositions for Modern Love and Portraits GRM. Stephen O’Malley, meanwhile, is practically ubiquitous in the music world, having performed in Sunn O))), Khanate, KTL, and founded his own Ideologic Organ label in 2011 as a repository for all things esoteric and avant garde. It proves a welcome home for Does Spring Hide Its Joy, providing physical formats for the audiophiles and sonic obsessives who may note the album is mastered by the equally lauded Stephan Mathieu.

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. “Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.”

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. Floods of intensity hurtle towards each other, hiding magic as they live and grow in each section. Deep rumbles rise up in the final throes of ‘v2.3’, gritty and monolithic as the jagged edges of electronic tones and mesmerising cello coalesce completely.

And as the plants and pavements unfreeze and the creatures with them, the trio meet the rest of the world, stepping out in unison to bathe in sound together. Does Spring Hide Its Joy premiered in July 2021, lingering in acoustic space through concerts and sound installations before its ultimate release in 2023. Across its expansive runtime, it generates a listening experience equally arresting in the headphones as it is during its deeply immersive live performances, merging with the acoustics of every space it resides in.

An enchanting feat in Kali Malone’s artistic evolution, the limited palettes of Does Spring Hide Its Joy contain multitudes of sounds and expressions in their slowly wandering evocations. As she said herself, “I didn’t want landmarks that anchor your memory of the music. I want it to be this indescribable feeling.” And just like the album’s impenetrable, persevering aura, nothing can interrupt the momentum Kali Malone has gathered.

Kali Malone (featuring Stephen O'Malley & Lucy Railton)