Kali Malone @ The Lab, San Francisco, 7 April 2023

My recent trip to the USA was a chance to reconnect with the depths of live underground music which I felt had eluded me since 2020 and the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world recovers so too does underground and experimental music, but the return of live events – particularly outside festival events – has been slow and selective particularly in making their way to my corner of the world. Good Friday 2023 was an opportunity to hear Kali Malone perform two works principally composed for synthesizer, with a clean and encircling surround sound provided by suitably austere San Francisco venue The Lab.

2022 LP ‘Living Torch’ was an unexpected highlight to the year for me, a pinnacle of the Portraits GRM series which has produced works from an extremely high calibre of artists so far (acknowledging, of course, the legacy of INA GRM and Editions Mego which have merged into Portraits GRM). Kali’s April 2023 set had links to the humanised solemnity of ‘Living Torch’ and the eerie refraction of this year’s ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’, while given greater spatial and dynamic movement to befit a more engaged live dynamic.

The first circa 50 minute piece of the evening, which (if my recollection is correct – a troublesome assumption) was a work yet to find its way to a recorded release, synthesised stems provided by cellist Lucy Railton as was also part of the compositional language on ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’. Initial monotonic cycles burgeoned with sympathetic layering of synthesizer tones, which then slowly opened into harmonic dispersal and strong low-end thrust – before returning to a minimal place from which to build an even stronger second quake, further shifts of synth adopting the repetitive melodic shape of the underlying string refrain. Over visuals seeming to find microscopic detail in natural elements – a clever representation of the finessing of acoustic sounds which Kali’s work often surveys – the acoustic and electronic elements rose in tempest, before a slow retreat left more fragmented cello off-cuts to bounce against one another to finally quell the extended piece.

The second work of the evening was an eight channel spatial remaining of material from ‘Living Torch’, this time using breathy woodwind tones as the track’s building blocks rather than the tensile strings of the first set. The coarse quality of the bass clarinet notes lifted into its own low grey noise which lurked at the back of the speaker space, treated orchestral lift-outs becoming further immersed with the synth treatments, also starting to peer out from the simpler stereo presentation which started while imperceptibly stacking small interval builds over its clean tones. The result traversed more complex chordalities than the first piece of the night, and was a more diffusive work as well: not done with marking puncture holes from the increasingly dense and pressured-affected acoustic stems, a patina of storm cloud distortion moved in over the increasingly unsettled drone and embraced its tumultuous tangle, urging the piece to an aggressive climax before a retreat into remnant tonalities.

To describe Kali’s performances as drone works, while somewhat true, feels somewhat dismissive and uncongratulatory. The complexity to both, while was slow in affect and trajectory, was in focus and detail on the finer edges of sound, demanding attention as much as immersion. Whether my memory has aggrandised the live works compared to Kali’s sedate recordings, or whether the live setting added an inevitable keener dynamic, I can’t now say with confidence – but regardless the care and detail to Kali’s work easily translated to a live setting and embraced the volume and space of the venue for maximum affect.

http://www.kalimalone.com