The Sacrificial Code (2025 edition) by KALI MALONE

2025 edition. Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code is the 2019 breakthrough album of the acclaimed composer’s pipe organ pieces. Her temporally informed studies of harmonics and intonation breathed life into a suite of compositions which leaves the heart moved and mind still. This 2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track Sacrificial Code III.

Pitchfork praised the album for its "time-stretching properties" and "clean minimalism". Resident Advisor described the album as an "exercise in concentration, restraint, and focus". Tiny Mix Tapes emphasized the "intensity and intimacy" of the album, pointing out how Malone's close miking technique brings out every textural detail of the organ, creating a highly focused and immersive listening experience.

48k/32bit master by Rashad Becker


::::::


Kali Malone’s landmark album The Sacrificial Code emerged from a momentous confluence of dedication and inspiration. In 2019, Malone was finishing a master's thesis in electroacoustic composition at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, having spent several years studying how sound and space interact, both academically and as a part of Sweden’s underground music community. An apprenticeship with the organ tuner Jan Börjeson opened up the instrument’s history as a laboratory for the development of various tuning systems, resonating with her interest in the sublime, uncanny soundworlds that exist beyond equal temperament. Countless hours were spent imagining new ways to conceptualize archaic compositional forms like canons, embracing their limitations as a way to peel away dramatic flourishes so only a stark core remains. A vision of music began to crystalize that was instilled with koan-like dualities of restraint and spectacle, stasis and variation, intimacy and grandeur.

Six years after its initial release, Ideologic Organ has reissued The Sacrificial Code, adorned with striking archival organ photography by Malone and including a new arrangement of the titular composition recorded in 2023 on the 16th-century meantone organ at Malmö Konstmuseum. The album remains one of the defining works of 21st-century minimalism, singular in its approach and impact. Its legacy has been defined by the revelatory experiences of those who encountered it, passed from listener to listener by word of mouth. The intensely personal experience of taking in these sounds, sitting with them for over an hour, absorbing each chordal shift in countless repetitions and finding oneself within them, became the driver of its slow cultural saturation. As she began regularly performing these pieces in churches and concert halls around the world, their impact deepened.

To produce the reissue, Malone went so far as to return to the copy machine at the legendary EMS studios in Stockholm to lay out the typography, revisiting the physical spaces in which it was created and remaining faithful to its DIY roots. The album’s first three pieces - “Spectacle of Ritual,” “Sacrificial Code,” and “Rose Wreath Crown (for CW)” - were captured voice by voice, each in single takes, on the Mats Arvidsson organ in Kirnberger III temperament as a part of her thesis. They were realized in isolation, and were originally presented as electroacoustic works on multi-channel speaker arrays in acousmoniums, speaker domes, and an abandoned iron mine. “Sacer Profanare,” “Litanic Cloth Wrung,” and “Fifth Worship II” were all recorded within two-hours of borrowed studio time on the Woehl organ at Studio Acusticum in Piteå; their patient and deliberate nature cutting through the hasty timeline of their capture. With each, Malone was developing and deploying self-taught close micing techniques to reproduce the most granular, air-filled sound of the instrument, bringing the listener into its stoically heaving guts.

The effect of all this careful work is a sense of time dilation, the physicality of the sound itself - the thunderous rolls of bass, the pitched hiss of the flue, the quivering dance of air molecules animated by dissonance - drawing attention away from the clock. Each piece cycles through purposefully constructed chord progressions, the repetition creating moments that can feel anthemic or mournful depending on the harmonic resonance and duration of the piece. These reiterations become so steady and expected that at the end of “Fifth Worship II,” when Malone switches off the organ mid-stream and the harmonics wither and fall, it feels like the ground slips away from under us. Repetition becomes the magnetic force shaping and stabilizing space and time.

Recurrence has also been a hallmark of Malone’s work on a larger scale, as evidenced by the third, new iteration of “Sacrificial Code” included on this reissue. She frequently returns to compositions, including multiple versions across various releases (“Fifth Worship” was originally heard on Organ Dirges 2016-2017, an experimental precursor to The Sacrificial Code), and they often change as they are performed over successive years and on different organs. Recorded five years after the two versions originally included on the album, “Sacrificial Code III” is absent the sense of sorrowful gravity heard in the previous versions, replaced by a sense of relative tranquility and performed in a higher register - an expressive shift that naturally occurred through years of repeated live performances. As The Sacrificial Code resurfaces, it retains its power but feels rejuvenated in this new context, inevitably changed by the years between then and now. Like any highly personal work, how those changes manifest depend on the listener, how they meet the sounds, and how those years have changed them in return.

–Jonathan Williger, February 2025

composer, organist & synthesist

contact shelterpress@gmail.com for all shipping inquiries

kalimalone.com
Instagram