The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ—pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin—but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as pronounced as the ridges and grooves of corrugated metal. Malone once said that drone composer Éliane Radigue “tunes the listener’s attention to a place somewhere between committed focus and surrendered consciousness,” and the same goes for her own music. Malone’s patient, cycling melodies suggest spiritual contemplation, yet their immense physicality is monolithic, monumental, mind-emptying.
Originally released in 2019, The Sacrificial Code was Malone’s breakout album, following a run of records—drone meditations for electric guitars, electronics, strings, gongs, and wind instruments—that the American-born musician recorded after moving to Stockholm, where she studied alternative tuning systems and threw herself into the city’s experimental music scene. The Sacrificial Code soon established a cult following, perhaps in part because its dissociative repetitions felt particularly suited to the mood of enforced stasis that landed like an anvil in March 2020.
The album paved the way for a series of acclaimed works that would demonstrate the full range of Malone’s talents: Living Torch, a multi-channel piece for bass clarinet, trombone, and ARP 2500 synthesizer; Does Spring Hide Its Joy, a three-hour drone epic recorded during the doldrums of lockdown with cellist Lucy Railton and Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley; and last year’s All Life Long, a suite of interwoven pieces for pipe organ, brass ensemble, and chamber choir. That material, which Malone and her players have performed extensively over the past couple of years, represents her most compositionally ambitious work to date. But a new reissue of The Sacrificial Code offers the chance to revisit a pivotal moment in Malone’s artistic development, when ideas that might seem principally formalist—about early-modern musical forms and arcane tuning systems—came together in an album charged with unusually powerful emotional resonance. In its bracing purity and focused intent, it remains a high-water mark in her catalog.
The first thing we hear, on the opening “Spectacle of Ritual,” is a major triad whose thick, guttural tones shudder with rapid-fire movements—an unusual interference pattern that seems to grow more pronounced across the full minute that she holds the otherwise unchanging chord. The organ Malone used for the album’s first three pieces was tuned in Kirnberger III temperament, an 18th-century tuning system developed by a student of Johann Sebastian Bach, but you don’t need to know anything about its particulars to recognize its fundamental strangeness. (A suggestion offered by one expert succinctly sums up its peculiarities: “Make all the fifths around the circle between C and E equally narrow and rough.”) Unlike equal temperament, designed to sound balanced and natural—to contemporary Western ears, anyway—in any key or register, the tuning systems that Malone favors are full of quirks and compromises that make harmonies shift unpredictably, as though rolling over rutted ground. Broad expanses of tone waver like highway mirages; chords slosh like bailing buckets. In contrast to the immaculate symmetry we might expect from the churchly instrument, Malone’s organs sound fleshly and fallible.
Most of the pieces on The Sacrificial Code are based on the canon, a Renaissance contrapuntal form in which a single melody is mirrored across multiple voices, sometimes at different speeds. But in Malone’s hands, the underlying architecture is rarely obvious; the music’s structural elements are submerged in the muck of clashing frequencies. The stately pace and unpredictable course yield maze-like repetitions; winding your way through the chord changes, you’re never quite sure if you have previously turned a particular corner. In “Sacrificial Code,” slowly spiraling sequences pursue an M.C. Escher-like ascent; in “Litanic Cloth Wrung,” the shifting chords have the geometric feel of quilt blocks.
The overarching impression is one of steady, ceaseless motion—and never-ending reinvention, as tones collide and recombine. With every change of a note, the beating patterns shift—sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and sometimes moving in waves, like op-art moiré. The internal complexity of all those innumerable permutations creates an unusual emotional effect: Rather than conventional tension and release, Malone’s canons create a landscape where everything is in flux. One set of tones might resolve while another simultaneously sparks new friction. The most reassuring consonance is shadowed by the possibility that everything might fall apart at any moment.
The pieces’ cyclical nature makes them feel like they could go on forever; rarely do they reach anything like a climax or a resolution. Instead, they mostly just wind down, part by part, ending in a long chord that Malone holds as long as she likes, luxuriating in the rumbling. In a few cases, she plays the same piece on different occasions on different organs, in different ways, contributing to the impression that these are less discrete compositions than eternal patterns channeled from the ether. “Sacrificial Code” reappears twice: in a sumptuously drawn-out 13-minute version, brighter and cleaner in tone and more than twice the length of the original, and then, in a bonus track exclusive to the reissue, in a version recorded in 2023 on the Malmö Konstmuseum’s 16th-century meantone organ, one of the oldest functioning organs in the world. Just four minutes long, “Sacrificial Code III” sounds wholly distinct from its predecessors: Where the original trudges wearily, dutifully forward, and “Sacrificial Code II” moves with courtly elegance, the new version is clear and wild as a mountain stream, air hissing through the flues with every attack.
One other repeat performance appears on The Sacrificial Code: “Fifth Worship II,” which reprises a piece from Malone’s more sketchlike 2018 album Organ Dirges 2016-2017. It’s one of the album’s highlights—and most surprising tracks. Rather than churning in place, it maps out something like a path of ascension over its nearly eight-minute run. Malone begins deep in the lower register, summoning doom metal’s low-end gravity. Slowly and almost imperceptibly she moves up the scale, from ashen craters to sunlit peaks, Sunn O))) to Arvo Pärt. Finally, having reached the sparkling zenith, she switches off the motor that pumps life through the organ. For the next minute, the final tones of the piece drift slowly downward—trembling, keening, souring in tone, like dejected birds. Compared to the overwhelming physicality of what has come before, it feels like everything is dissolving into air.
