The very first thing we hear, on the opening “Spectacle of Ritual,” is a serious triad whose thick, guttural tones shudder with rapid-fire actions—an uncommon interference sample that appears to develop extra pronounced throughout the complete minute that she holds the in any other case unchanging chord. The organ Malone used for the album’s first three items was tuned in Kirnberger III temperament, an 18th-century tuning system developed by a scholar of Johann Sebastian Bach, however you don’t must know something about its particulars to acknowledge its basic strangeness. (A suggestion provided by one professional succinctly sums up its peculiarities: “Make all of the fifths across the circle between C and E equally slender and tough.”) Not like equal temperament, designed to sound balanced and pure—to modern Western ears, anyway—in any key or register, the tuning programs that Malone favors are stuffed with quirks and compromises that make harmonies shift unpredictably, as if rolling over rutted floor. Broad expanses of tone waver like freeway mirages; chords slosh like bailing buckets. In distinction to the stainless symmetry we’d anticipate from the churchly instrument, Malone’s organs sound fleshly and fallible.
Many of the items on The Sacrificial Code are based mostly on the canon, a Renaissance contrapuntal kind through which a single melody is mirrored throughout a number of voices, typically at completely different speeds. However in Malone’s palms, the underlying structure is never apparent; the music’s structural components are submerged within the muck of clashing frequencies. The stately tempo and unpredictable course yield maze-like repetitions; winding your means by way of the chord adjustments, you’re by no means fairly certain when you have beforehand turned a selected nook. In “Sacrificial Code,” slowly spiraling sequences pursue an M.C. Escher-like ascent; in “Litanic Material Wrung,” the shifting chords have the geometric really feel of quilt blocks.
The overarching impression is one in every of regular, ceaseless movement—and unending reinvention, as tones collide and recombine. With each change of a notice, the beating patterns shift—typically quicker, typically slower, and typically shifting in waves, like op-art moiré. The inner complexity of all these innumerable permutations creates an uncommon emotional impact: Slightly than standard stress and launch, Malone’s canons create a panorama the place every little thing is in flux. One set of tones may resolve whereas one other concurrently sparks new friction. Probably the most reassuring consonance is shadowed by the chance that every little thing may collapse at any second.
The items’ cyclical nature makes them really feel like they might go on ceaselessly; hardly ever do they attain something like a climax or a decision. As a substitute, they principally simply wind down, half by half, ending in a protracted chord that Malone holds so long as she likes, luxuriating within the rumbling. In a number of circumstances, she performs the identical piece on completely different events on completely different organs, in numerous methods, contributing to the impression that these are much less discrete compositions than everlasting patterns channeled from the ether. “Sacrificial Code” reappears twice: in a sumptuously drawn-out 13-minute model, brighter and cleaner in tone and greater than twice the size of the unique, after which, in a bonus monitor unique to the reissue, in a model recorded in 2023 on the Malmö Konstmuseum’s Sixteenth-century meantone organ, one of many oldest functioning organs on this planet. Simply 4 minutes lengthy, “Sacrificial Code III” sounds wholly distinct from its predecessors: The place the unique trudges wearily, dutifully ahead, and “Sacrificial Code II” strikes with courtly class, the brand new model is evident and wild as a mountain stream, air hissing by way of the flues with each assault.
