KALI MALONE - Music For Intersecting Planes

Le Temple de la Tour de Peilz, in Switzerland, is a simple church of squared white stone topped with a papaya-colored tiled roof. The bare interior is enlivened only by the colorful mosaic stained-glass windows and by an elegant steel-blue organ that looks as though it stepped straight out of a shot from "Grand Budapest Hotel".

It's here, by candlelight in the depths of a freezing winter, that the performance by Kali Malone and Leila Bordreuil was recorded — an opportunity to delve into the possible relationships between sound and space.

From a purely sonic standpoint, it's a successful collaboration: Kali Malone's icy, existential style, always lit by a certain ecstatic rigor, blends well with the tactile, material avant-garde of the French-American cellist, who pushes her instrument to the brink of delirium. Her "Not An Elegy" might seem like the antithesis of "The Sacrificial Code", yet together the two have crafted a fascinating, layered hybrid capable of unsettling anyone who is human, all too human.

The intimate relationship between organ and cello is enriched by feedback, electroacoustic counterpoints and ambient interference (the sound of bells, a distant engine, voices lost in the reverb), unfolding across the four tracks with a rocky consistency, oscillating between musique concrète suggestions and mysterious sinusoidal shadows straight out of fourth world music. Yet this sonic golem finds its best results within itself, in its stylistic coherence and compositional richness, while struggling to break out of its own weave, to expand into the surrounding space, to truly engage with its environment and let itself be shaped and contaminated by it. The search for a tangible sculptural form the listener can actually experience ends up frustrated, caught in a dialogue between natures that never fully develops.

The evocative, grainy resonances settle into a slow, ritualistic repetition that's hard to be drawn into, so that the artistic experiment's only truly tangible and appreciable achievement lies in its formal rigor.

The record is devoted to an extreme, crepuscular minimalism whose greatest weakness may lie precisely in that minimalism. The sonic body built by Kali Malone and Leila Bordreuil is compelling but sluggish, concrete and rough yet oddly settled, at times too static to convey the depth and dynamism of a living experience. If we want to be uncharitable, the problem may also stem from the extreme modesty of the architecture, which in its unadorned simplicity accompanies the performance without ever really shaping it with any real conviction. It's a Swiss church, and, without meaning to be sacrilegious, that famous line from "The Third Man", delivered by Orson Welles, seems to (re)echo fittingly here: to paraphrase, one might say you can hear the creative fruits of five hundred years of unblemished tranquility.

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03/04/2026