The first thing we hear, on the opening “Spectacle of Ritual,” is a major triad whose thick, guttural tones shudder with rapid-fire movements—an unusual interference pattern that seems to grow more pronounced across the full minute that she holds the otherwise unchanging chord. The organ Malone used for the album’s first three pieces was tuned in Kirnberger III temperament, an 18th-century tuning system developed by a student of Johann Sebastian Bach, but you don’t need to know anything about its particulars to recognize its fundamental strangeness. (A suggestion offered by one expert succinctly sums up its peculiarities: “Make all the fifths around the circle between C and E equally narrow and rough.”) Unlike equal temperament, designed to sound balanced and natural—to contemporary Western ears, anyway—in any key or register, the tuning systems that Malone favors are full of quirks and compromises that make harmonies shift unpredictably, as though rolling over rutted ground. Broad expanses of tone waver like highway mirages; chords slosh like bailing buckets. In contrast to the immaculate symmetry we might expect from the churchly instrument, Malone’s organs sound fleshly and fallible.
Most of the pieces on The Sacrificial Code are based on the canon, a Renaissance contrapuntal form in which a single melody is mirrored across multiple voices, sometimes at different speeds. But in Malone’s hands, the underlying architecture is rarely obvious; the music’s structural elements are submerged in the muck of clashing frequencies. The stately pace and unpredictable course yield maze-like repetitions; winding your way through the chord changes, you’re never quite sure if you have previously turned a particular corner. In “Sacrificial Code,” slowly spiraling sequences pursue an M.C. Escher-like ascent; in “Litanic Cloth Wrung,” the shifting chords have the geometric feel of quilt blocks.
The overarching impression is one of steady, ceaseless motion—and never-ending reinvention, as tones collide and recombine. With every change of a note, the beating patterns shift—sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and sometimes moving in waves, like op-art moiré. The internal complexity of all those innumerable permutations creates an unusual emotional effect: Rather than conventional tension and release, Malone’s canons create a landscape where everything is in flux. One set of tones might resolve while another simultaneously sparks new friction. The most reassuring consonance is shadowed by the possibility that everything might fall apart at any moment.
The pieces’ cyclical nature makes them feel like they could go on forever; rarely do they reach anything like a climax or a resolution. Instead, they mostly just wind down, part by part, ending in a long chord that Malone holds as long as she likes, luxuriating in the rumbling. In a few cases, she plays the same piece on different occasions on different organs, in different ways, contributing to the impression that these are less discrete compositions than eternal patterns channeled from the ether. “Sacrificial Code” reappears twice: in a sumptuously drawn-out 13-minute version, brighter and cleaner in tone and more than twice the length of the original, and then, in a bonus track exclusive to the reissue, in a version recorded in 2023 on the Malmö Konstmuseum’s 16th-century meantone organ, one of the oldest functioning organs in the world. Just four minutes long, “Sacrificial Code III” sounds wholly distinct from its predecessors: Where the original trudges wearily, dutifully forward, and “Sacrificial Code II” moves with courtly elegance, the new version is clear and wild as a mountain stream, air hissing through the flues with every attack.
