Kali Malone - Living Torch

With its unique structural form and harmonic material, Living Torch is a bold continuation of Kali Malone's extensive and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a significant new composition by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire.

Moving away from the pipe organ that Malone's music is best known for, Living Torch presents a complex electro-acoustic ensemble. Flipping through recordings from conventional instruments like trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, he runs through sine generators and Éliane Radigue's ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves together its own history, genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach with a liberated tonal palette.

Living Torch was originally commissioned by GRM for its legendary speaker orchestra Acousmonium and premiered in full multi-channel form at the Grand Hall of Radio France in a concert dedicated exclusively to the author.

Composed at GRM's Paris studios in 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that uniquely straddles the border between instrumental writing and electro-acoustic composition. Living Torch draws from many lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism and musique concrète. It is a work turned as much to the exploration of just-tuned harmony and canonical structures as it is to the polyphony of unique tones, the scaling of dynamic range and the uncovering of sonic qualities.

GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), a pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acoustic and musique concrète, has been a unique sound research laboratory since 1958. A testament to the extraordinary vitality of the music that GRM embodies is the Portraits GRM recording series, which expands and extends this dynamic with Kali Malone's Living Torch album.