Kali Malone's music makes the case that spectacle registers in the body first. Scale, duration, the churches and halls she performs in - all of it converges on a very private kind of wonder, a space where sound can hold reflection and tenderness at once. Behind that grandeur, the work itself has been built on discipline: structures that impose cyclical returns, the close labour of microtonal harmony, the physical fact of air rushing through pipes. Her music is elemental before it is monumental.

Burning Song is Malone's first album of new solo compositions since All Life Long (2024), and it marks a real shift in method. The matrices that governed her earlier organ music give way to something more intuitive and direct. Each piece proceeds in a single line, and the seven pieces are linked by subtle bridging tones. The album was recorded at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the final 27 years of his life and where his remains lie beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church's Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 whose tuning and temperament follow baroque-era norms. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O'Malley on bowed acoustic guitar - the same trio that developed Does Spring Hide Its Joy through sustained, close listening. The sessions took place across two late nights in August 2025, with engineer Francesco Donadello placing more than 20 microphones through the room and close to the instruments, so that the listener is positioned inside the sanctuary as the sound fills it.

Chord follows chord in slow succession, like stones of different weight and colour laid along a path. The trio moves as a single body, step by step, through passages that turn ambiguous or radiant, occasionally triumphant as the tones climb into the organ's upper register. Setting aside the canon form that shaped much of her organ work, Malone allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and to speak more plainly than before. With one of the most analysed composers in history resting just below the floor, she describes feeling the weight of tradition lift, an ease of being determining the flow of the music. No piece is extended beyond what feels conclusive; the result is a relatively compact cycle.

The first half of Burning Song was commissioned for the 2023 Venice Music Biennale and presented at San Pietro di Castello. The earliest seeds were found on a piano backstage at Bozar in Brussels, late at night after a solo electronic performance, once the audience and staff had gone. It was the first time since childhood that Malone had used the piano to compose, and it opened a passage back to a younger self. The final three pieces were written quickly in the month before the 2025 sessions, their stately progressions arriving in the mind's ear with a sense of inevitability, hovering in the instant before understanding. The closing piece, My Eve My Dawn, states the method most clearly: endings and beginnings held together, sadness and joy crossed in turn, the connecting tones offering continuity and, with it, a form of acceptance.

Burning carries two meanings here. Fire moves intuitively, shifting shape from one moment to the next, relentless in its insistence - and Malone has moved from the fractal beauty of mathematics toward the pull of feeling, of foresight, of something less defined and more inward. But burning is also a process of transformation that spreads from a single point to consume whatever it touches. The freedom found in composing and realising Burning Song opens onto many possible futures. Out of the ash, something else will grow.

Recorded and mixed by Francesco Donadello, with recording assistance by Samuel Schwenk. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, London, March 2026. Design by JS Aurelius, photography by Kingsley Ifill, liner notes by Jonathan Williger. The LP is a tip-on gatefold with a printed inner sleeve holding a 24" x 36" full-colour poster, 140g black vinyl housed in a rice-paper inner sleeve. The CD comes in a 6-panel digisleeve with poster.