Kali Malone’s compositions are portals into an ever-evolving sonic landscape. After moving to Stockholm at the age of 18, the city’s burgeoning electroacoustic scene became her playground, allowing for audio explorations beyond the ordinary. Sacred undertones infuse her experimental music, bridging the gap between the profound and the ethereal.

The precision stems from a deep knowledge, blending fine-tuned melodies with technical intricacies, centered around the organ as her signature instrument. Each note is carefully calibrated and consistently deliberate, inviting the listener to a dimension where boundaries of sound are dissolved.

This spring, Malone reissues The Sacrificial Code (2019), a two-hour meditation on methodical organ recordings and the art of soundcraft. In this conversation with Linnéa Ruiz Mutikainen, she speaks about vulnerability, performing in sacred spaces, and her repudiation of lyrical recordings.

Your work dissects the science of sound through an ongoing electroacoustic dialogue between the analogue and digital techniques, stretching from tuning systems to traditional methods. What led you to this approach? And how do you integrate these formats, especially when they oppose each other?

I’ve had an interest in production from a young age, always recording and mixing my own projects, drawing sound from a variety of sources: be it instruments, field recordings, or synthesis. When I moved to Stockholm, I became deeply involved in the multigenerational electroacoustic music scene. I was making music at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), the state-funded electroacoustic music studio, I workedasasoundengineeratthe intermedia artist-run venue Fylkingen, and studied composition at The Royal College of Music.

People were openly sharing resources and teaching each other. There was a common ideology: all synthesis was produced through open-source coding software or on the shared Buchla and Serge synthesizers at EMS. No one was using commercial sample banks. If you wanted to have acoustic instruments in your piece, you needed to compose the part, find a musician, and record it yourself. Luckily, the recording facilities and equipment were free to use at EMS. Thanks to Fylkingen, the free jazz scene was closely affiliated with the electroacoustic scene. You could ask fantastic jazz musicians to come into the studio for the afternoon and record them – we had a good alliance. They could interpret our strange instructions, knew how to use extended techniques, and had excellent intonation when interpreting our unconventional tuning systems. They would close their eyes, understand the concept, be embodied in the sound, and perform beautifully, even if the task was grueling.

For my early pieces, I created my own libraries of instrument sounds to compose my tape pieces later. I wasn’t recording overt melodies or passages of the composition, but rather recording individual notes in various lengths and timbral variations. Later, I assembled these recordings into tape pieces together with synthesis. One main reason for doing this is because I was working with just intonation tuning. Many of the pitches took a bit of searching on the instrument before intonating correctly. Isolating every note was more manageable and gave me greater liberties while composing. The other reason was that most of these pieces were composed for acousmatic formats. The sound was spatialised in a multichannel speaker arrangement for concerts. I wanted to separate the notes so they would be spatialised in different parts of the room – and the harmony could come together in a spatialised geometric way.

When I started working with the organ on The Sacrificial Code, I used this same process, as the music was initially made for an acousmatic speaker dome. I recorded the music note by note to spatialise the 4-part harmony throughout the speaker dome. I wanted to demonstrate the cyclical nature of canonic music, bring the listener into the music’s architectural structure and the organ’s physicality. I experimented with microphone techniques to find the most granular enveloping sound that exposed the breath and air of the instrument. By isolating each note, I got a richer harmonic sound with more breath. It was easier to accentuate and sculpt in the mixing process. This was a tedious job because I didn’t want to create any fabricated repetitions in post-production. So, if I made a mistake in any of the takes, I would start on a new one. I made many mistakes because the process was so repetitive and it was easy to lose focus.

The entire process was a complex puzzle with many arbitrary and challenging rules I set for myself. However, the obsessive devotion to the process was grounding during a time of much turbulenceinmylife.Theworkgave me something to believe in.

In your most recent album, All Life Long (2024) there’s again a strong presence of the pipe organ. It seems like a more traditional release in terms of compositional techniques. What drew you back to it?

I never left the organ. While the instrumentation and compositional parameters vary between my projects, I still feel the same continuous thread throughout all the work. All Life Long uses more traditional compositional methods, as I did not approach this project from the electroacoustic tape-piece perspective I had on previous works.

I wrote the music in standard notation, recording the brass and choral performances in a pretty traditional way. I also recorded the pipe organ pieces in whole, not note-by-note as I did on The Sacrificial Code. I wanted my creative focus to be on the execution of the compositions. The pieces were recorded as close to perfect as possible, so the post-production process was quick and nonintrusive.

I like how you once mentioned that leaf-blowers running outside your window was one of the most beautiful sounds you’ve ever heard. Do you often pay attention to everyday sounds and find appeal in the “ugly”?

It depends. If I have music inside of me, I also hear the music in the environment. Ugly dissonant sounds create complexity and poeticism when in tension with beautiful consonant sounds.

It makes me think of the vulnerability in music. Elsewhere, you said that you stopped recording your singing because it felt too vulnerable, probing its complex, sometimes discomforting nature. How did it feel to distance yourself from it?

I sing every day, aloud and in my mind. My voice is my strongest compositional tool – my ear training and inner compass that scans the sound and navigates the direction of the music. It is the part of me that embodies sound. Just because I am not outwardly recording my own voice in my music, it doesn’t mean that I have distanced myself from it. I am close to my voice and the voice inside my mind.

Lyricism itself is vulnerable. To me, it’s a love-hate concept that can easily cross into oversharing territory: fascinating at first, but it can also become quite unsettling.

All messages have their own unique way of being communicated through music. Some messages take a long time to decipher and change over time. Every decision in the sound is communication. Sometimes words are limiting. Sometimes words are necessary. If the message succeeds in being communicated through the music, there is no privacy remaining regardless of the use of language.

You have lived in Stockholm since your late teenage years. I grew up there. Scandinavia as a whole tends to orbit around introspection and privacy. Do you feel this has impacted your creative process and identity?

I have deep authentic relationships with many Swedish people. It takes time to make those close bonds like anywhere else. But I do think it’s easier to connect with people in new cultures through music. I moved there alone as a teenager and was accepted and supported by a multigenerational community of artists connected to EMS and Fylkingen. There was and still is a strong collective identity that persists with my Swedish artist friends. This can sometimes manifest as homogeneity, but it also creates community and leads to collaboration. My label collective XKatedral is a way for us to all still stay connected through artistic projects even while our solo work varies.

Many of your performances are set in sacred spaces like cathedrals and churches. What is that like, performing in a holy space?

It’s an interesting process and I am still learning how to navigate it. I for years before performing in them. This was a great way to learn the etiquette and communication techniques with the church workers and how to take care of the building and instruments. It’s very novel to get the keys to these old marvellous buildings, going in at night to work with the organs. Being alone in those massive ritualistic spaces in the dark with my music is pretty incredible.

Sometimes, navigating the conservative elements of these spaces can be challenging. My music being secular and non-traditional raises questions, sometimes protests. I generally find that if I can communicate face to face with the people at the church, they will understand that I’m a respectful person and passionate about the organ. Generally, southern Europe is more conservative and Catholic, which makes it difficult to use the organ for secular music, while Protestant countries can be more open to playing secular music in church. There is always some apprehension because I never know how it will go until I arrive. Not just socially – every organ is totally different and every church has a complex acoustic nature that takes time to learn.

I am aware that my own behaviour has a big influence on the church’s decision whether or not to entrust the organ to others like me in the future. My own performance is not the only goal, rather it is an opening so these incredible instruments can be played by more people. It’s powerful to see the small change that my concerts have had. Many times, I have been the first “contemporary music” concert to happen in churches, and then those churches have opened up to program more secular contemporary music.