An album that will steamroll the listener: on »Does Spring Hide Its Joy«, US-born artist Kali Malone teamed up with guitarist Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) and cellist Lucy Railton. While working on the album, Kali Malone connected the sound in such a way that you can hardly make out any transitions between the individual pieces; »Does Spring Hide Its Joy« is a gigantic, constantly changing universe made up of sometimes very subtle, sometimes powerful sounds. Harmony and drone stand side by side seemingly naturally. The album was made in the spring of 2020. Together with Railton and O’Malley, Malone was able to explore the Berlin Funkhaus and MONOM, using the empty concert venues to make new music. Needless to say, all of this can also be experienced with a suitable academic superstructure: sinus oscillators and harmonics, interference patterns and other vocabulary can all be unpacked for this album. Yet the minimalism, the power of »Does Spring Hide Its Joy« can only be discerned if you dedicate plenty of time to this album and fully engage with these moments, this shifting, this change. Why does that sound so strange and yet so familiar? According to Kali Malone, the recordings naturally reflect the changed perception of time in the first months of the pandemic, when the days no longer had any structure, the weeks ticked by and a question mark hung over everything. An album that perfectly transforms this period into an art form that challenges and engages. And that’s exactly what makes this steamroller so great.
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