Minimalist and monumental music from “All Life Long” played by Kali Malone, Stephen O’Malley, Macadam Ensemble and Opus 333 remarkably resonated in the monumental space of the Eglise du Saint-Espirit de Paris.
After the Pandemic, we were left with countless recorded live concerts. One that stuck in my memory was the extraordinary recording of Kali Malone, Stephen O’Malley, and the Macadam Ensemble choir at the Festival Variations, beautifully filmed by Vincent Moon. I listened to it many times in close-up, enthralled because of its incredible mood and drama and the non-obviousness and sacredness of this music.
In 2024, these recordings were featured on “All Life Long”, 6th Kali Malone album, a unique and complex work. When it was announced that following the release of the album, she would play this material live accompanied by a choir and brass ensemble along with Stephen O’Malley, I knew I had to hear it live.
The concerts took place in Paris on 2 and 3 September. Built-in 1935, the Eglise du Saint-Espirit de Paris may be a somewhat inconspicuous church on the outside, but on the inside, it is monumental. Constructed entirely of reinforced concrete, somewhat in the Byzantine spirit, with a dome 22 meters in diameter and 33 meters high, and exceptional frescoes, it affected the atmosphere of the place but also the reverberation, which was of considerable importance for the resonance of the music.
The concert consisted of three parts, featuring 11 songs from ‘All Life Long’ but in an altered order depending on the artists performing them.
The first, in three movements, scored for a four-person Macadam Ensemble choir, demonstrating the space’s resonating possibilities, the polyphonic singing carrying up to the ceiling. Beginning with the invisibly pulsating ‘Passing Through Spheres”, the delicate, subtle sound carried across the monumental building, delighting the interweaving male tenor, countertenor, bass, and baritone who poignantly opened the evening with texts by Agamben, Symons, and Lowell.
The second consisted of three additional compositions scored for brass quintet Opus 333 for four saxhorns (two bass, baritone, and alto) and bugle trumpet. The brass is almost made to play in space with reverberation, which here extended to a few seconds. The instruments resonated tremendously, thickening and filling the temple space. Their intensification was sometimes reminiscent of synthesizers in timbre, so intensely layered was the music, which was also a result of the venue and the concrete surface.
The third movement was played for two positive pipe organs. Malone played the first piece alone; in the following ones, O’Malley accompanied her. Droning drone strands and subtle intervals built an unhurried but focused narrative. Vibrating sounds and stratifying notes made the details highlighted heard by the audience. O’Malley often played dense, low bass notes, fading into the ecclesiastical space but perfectly punctuating Malone’s higher notes. This music did not rush; it lasted. As the minutes passed, one could get lost in time; its meditative nature increasingly looped in a trance-like resonance. The endings of the songs were stretched to their limits, and their duration, which in the case of ‘Fastened Maze’ or ‘No Sun to Burn’, for example, in the form of an astringent vibrato, had a taste of cosmic music.
Crucially, this was an entirely acoustic concert, and the church’s space was its natural ally, affecting a natural yet monumental resonance. The space amplified the music, building a character of solemnity, becoming a site-specific event with the concrete architecture of the venue as another instrument. In the end, it is in such a temple that this music drones on endlessly, developing the themes taken up on ‘All Life Long’ in a monumental venue that resonates most clearly and sensitively. It was a unique and amazing experience.
More concerts with this material are still to come this year, including at St-Martin-In-The-Fields in London this week, the extraordinary Temppeliaukio in Helsinki (organ only), Berlin’s Gedächtniskirch. They will play also in Poland at Unsound in October, as a double-bill with Ireland’s Lankum.
