Review Summary: “i made a 3 hour ambient album” “oh wow so did my dishwasher”
Kali Malone’s massive new album is a lot to take in, and I’m not sure I should be reviewing it. This uncertainty is, of course, the kind of silly thing that only comes from engaging in layers of trivial discourse. Is any way of engaging with a piece of art really more valid than any other? Does one really need to understand the sum total of all the history that creates the context for a work? In the case of music, surely all one really needs to know or care about is whether it makes their ears feel nice or not? Anything beyond that is just noise.
So, forging ahead through the petty self-doubt, I will take a more personal route to describing this music. A little backstory is in order, because, if you told me a year ago that I would be reviewing a three-hour-long drone album composed of three, hour-long versions of the same composition performed on cello, guitar, and tuned sine wave oscillators (whatever the f
uck those even are), I might have laughed in your face. You see, as a listener, I am primarily concerned with “songwriting,” some combination of lyrics, melodies, and structures, and the way the music attempts to convey some kind of emotion from the performer; the human element is key, and I don’t particularly care about how innovative the music is as long as it makes me feel something. For all these reasons, I have not typically sought out experimental music or, particularly, ambient music of various kinds. Not that those types of music necessarily lack the features I outlined above, but certainly the approach artists making that type of music typically take is different from that of most of my favorite music. Experimental, ambient, drone, and so on, were the kind of stuff I would appreciate but not really care about. Ya feel?
But toward the middle of 2022, I came across a couple albums that sparked a slight shift in my approach. Character development! One of these albums was Kali Malone’s
Living Torch (the other is a story for a different day). I tried that album out primarily because of its brevity; at only about 33 minutes, it was about as approachable as a drone/electroacoustic/minimalism/whatever album can be (quite the contrary to
Does Spring Hide Its Joy). And to my surprise, I quite liked it! I began using it and other drone/ambient/etc. albums primarily while reading, as “background” music. And as tends to happen, spending more time engaging with these types of music unlocked a greater appreciation for them. I thus resolved to dig deeper into Malone’s catalog in particular (her 2019 masterwork
The Sacrificial Code becoming a particular favorite). And through that process, I unsurprisingly discovered that my biases against such types of music were rather unfounded; surely the kinds of emotion and performance involved here are different from my historical favorites, but emotion nonetheless there is in these genres! And so, we land here, with
Does Spring Hide Its Joy.
In all honesty, despite the expanse of content on display here, I don’t have too much to say about it other than that I really like it! The question, though, is why do I like it? One reason is the way the music, despite being formed out of such simple elements, and being so seemingly static, is actually ever-shifting and incredibly dynamic. The three performers here each bring something unique to the table, and hearing the myriad ways they explore the textures of their instruments and play with the ways they meld together is fascinating. Key to the concept of this work is time and the perception of it, and I just love the way I become totally immersed in the world of the music, the way everything seems to slow down if I focus on the pulses of Malone’s sine waves or the ebb and flow of the intensity of Stephen O’Malley’s guitar feedback or the irregular bowing and the subtle imperfections of the tone of Lucy Railton’s cello. The latter especially is key to the appeal of this work: Railton provides that essential human element, constantly leaving me in awe of the focus and precision it must take to control the tones of her instrument and the pulse and strength of her bowing as she responds to Malone and O’Malley and they to her. Perhaps my own history as a violist in high school helps me appreciate this; indeed, all this is the kind of music that many might listen to and think, “Surely anybody could do this?”*
But the more I listen to
Does Spring Hide Its Joy, the more impressed I am with the sheer focus and craft that must have gone into it, the hypnosis it invites despite the constant sense of anxiety and anticipation that underlies it all, because, again, this music that seems so simple and static is in fact constantly changing; listening to this, I always think anything could happen at any moment. Even if many of my listens have been in the background while going about other tasks, it’s always something of a draining experience. Fortunately, since each track is a unique performance of the concept, they play well individually, and when strung together, at the very least there are brief moments of release between them, allowing a brief respite to catch my breath.
I’ve now said more than I thought I would. I still don’t really know if this is all that special in the grand scheme of whatever context it belongs to. Maybe I’m wrong and this stuff really is as simple to make as the naïve listener I invoked above thinks. But it doesn’t really matter, because I love it, goddamn it. It makes my ears feel nice. The joys of this music may well be hidden, but luckily enough for me, I found them.
* An idea that the summary above plays on; see the cartoon linked here for its source: https://i.redd.it/sc6zdwv1wu811.jpg
