Kali Malone (Solo), François J. Bonnet & Stephen O’Malley (Duo), Kali Malone & Drew McDowall (duo)
Composer and electro-acoustic musician Kali Malone performs solo and in collaboration with longtime friend and electronic musician, Drew McDowall to fill the Pioneer Works Main Hall with rich and textural yet minimalist synths. Joined by electro-acoustic duo project by François J. Bonnet & Stephen O’Malley, who will be performing alongside films by Eléonore Huisse, these respective duos evoke worlds both serene and disruptive through complex instrumentation.
About the Artists
The works of composer and sound artist Kali Malone implement specific tuning systems in minimalist structures for pipe organ, choir, chamber music ensembles, and electroacoustic formats. Malone’s compositions are rich with harmonic texture through synthetic and acoustic instrumentation in repetitive motions and extended durations, emitting distinct emotive, dynamic, and affective hues which bring forth a stunning depth of focus. Kali Malone’s recently released albums The Sacrificial Code [2019], Living Torch [2022], and Does Spring Hide Its Joy featuring Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton [2023] quickly rose to international critical acclaim, the latter charting #4 on The Billboard classical crossover chart. She has performed extensively, presenting her music at Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Philharmonie de Paris, La Biennale di Venezia, Radio France, Rockefeller Chapel, Grace Cathedral, The Southbank Center, Bozar, Schauspielhaus, Berghain, Unsound Festival, Berlin Atonal, Moogfest, and Kanal Pompidou amongst many other museums, contemporary art spaces, concert halls, churches, and festivals throughout Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. Born in 1994 in Colorado US, Malone relocated to Stockholm SE in 2012 where she studied electroacoustic composition at The Royal College of Music and co-founded the record label and concert series XKatedral, together with Maria W Horn.
Kali Malone and Drew McDowall first met during the 2016 edition of Berlin Atonal when Malone stumbled into a patch of burning nettles and turned around to find a sympathetic McDowall. The two became fast friends.
Living between Europe and the US, it would take many years of deep friendship before a studio collaboration between Kali Malone & Drew McDowall would transpire. And when it did, the music emerged as freely as if it were another extension of their conversations. The two have developed a uniquely identifiable musical syntax that is rigorous, assured, and sincerely themselves, seeing Malone’s emotively rich melodies soar within the resonant timbres of McDowall’s transmutational synthesis.
Drew McDowall is a Scottish born, NYC based composer and musician. He was a member of Coil in the 90’s contributing heavily to some of their most respected and influential works. An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and transcendental otherness. His work has been described as “sacraments to alterity”, with meditative compositions that are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with acoustic instruments and cut-up field recordings, deconstructing and reconfiguring sounds into otherworldly structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and always heavenly flickers of expansive beauty. He has released four albums on Dais Records since 2015 the most recent being Agalma (2020) and is known for his diverse collaborations, working with Kali Malone, Catarina Barbieri, Robert Aki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, Varg, Puce Mary, Shapednoise and others and has performed at many international festivals including CTM, Berlin Atonal, Dark Mofo, Unsound, Le Guess Who, Semibreve, WOS and Ambient Church. In July 2023 Dais Records released Lamina, a 6 CD career spanning, retrospective box set.
François J. Bonnet and Stephen O’Malley are long-term collaborators around editorial projects like Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM labels & SPECTRES journal. Bonnet and O’Malley initiated their duo project in the summer of 2018 as a commission from the ATONAL festival at Kraftwerk in Berlin. Their first album, Cylene appeared in late spring 2019, and the Cylene Suisse Redux LP in spring 2021 (with production by Jim O’Rourke and Ryoji Ikeda), both were released on Editions Mego. The music of this duo suggests a world at the same time serene and anxious, evoking the calm before or after the storm without excluding, from time to time, the storm itself.
François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theoretician based in Paris. He’s been a member of INA GRM since 2007 and became its director in 2018. He has published several books : The Order of Sounds, The Infra-World, After Death(all published by Urbanomic) and The Music To Come(Shelter Press). He’s the co-editor of the SPECTRES book series (Shelter Press) and the Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM record series (Editions Mego). He also produces radio shows for national radio France Musique. His music, often presented as Kassel Jaeger, has been played in renowned venues and festivals all over the world.
Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone and experimental music groups for over two decades – SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate being among his best-known creations. Wildly prolific, O’Malley’s oeuvre is defined by its remarkable breadth, complexity and multidisciplinary interests. It includes collaborations with a wide range of experimental artists, including Scott Walker, Kali Malone, Alvin Lucier, choreographer Gisèle Vienne, the authors Dennis Cooper and Alan Moore, Peter Rehberg, Fujiko Nakaya, Jim Jarmusch, Johan Johansson, experimental music research centers IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), EMS (Stockholm) and many others. O’Malley is also a vigorous live performer and has toured around the world since 2000. His live performances feature a reverberating fog of electric guitar minimalism – sorcery that challenges boundaries of space and time.