Next Spring, on Saturday April 10th, Kali Malone returns to The Great Organs at First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, one of the largest church organs in the world, to perform Burning Song, her forthcoming album on Ideologic Organ — a work composed for pipe organ, cello and guitar featuring Lucy Railton and Stephen O'Malley. The program also includes select compositions from Malone's vast organ discography.

Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. The music moves through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Feeling supersedes matrices, as each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy.

“Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of introspection and unwavering tenderness. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of her organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before.”

Kim Gordon and Bill Nace convene as Body/Head in L.A. on October 8th.

It’s been more than three years since these players unfurled their epic dual intuition live in this considerable town, and this return comes not a moment too soon.

On stage, their seemingly telepathic connection continues to mystify. Their electric guitar expressions and - and Gordon’s intimable vocal abstractions - are ever-novel and raw, poetic and cinematic. Do come through and feel the heat.

My Generation opens the show. Three L.A. artists known for their own unique expressions - vocalist N.A.S. (P22, Purity) guitarist Sara Gernsbacher (Mayako XO) and bassist Sophie Weil (Syko Friend) - come together to create some things entirely new. Sparse yet lambent, their single “Want It” hooks and hypnotizes, a beacon of the fresh directions forthcoming on an LP on Post Present Medium.

An evening featuring MSHR and The Tenses, two creative partnerships entwined in the story of Portland, Oregon’s fecund underground.

MSHR touch down in L.A. with the latest iteration of a live sound-sculpture cycle, performing on a menagerie of fantastical instruments of their own creation that can emit (and respond to) light, audio signal, and data. Through custom circuitry and software the duo coax a wild electronic stew of chirp, click, pulse, zap, and pow, enveloping the audience in an intermedia drama. MSHR is a collective comprised of Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper.

THE TENSES – the smoked-out duo of Ju Suk Reet Meate & Oblivia – again descend from the Pacific Northwest to offer us a slice of sublime subterranean Americana. Eerie mindscapes made spontaneously from crackles of found sound enmeshed with surf guitar and horn play, or whatever suits the day. The pair are, of course, key figures of SMEGMA, the Los Angeles Free Music Society-affiliated collective of avant agitators since all the way back.

And sonic action from around the way as Sam Rowell drops a new live rendition of her SPECIAL COLLECTIONS radio project, an interrogation of anomalous audio phenomena from across the electromagnetic spectrum, the built environment, and the natural world.

Plus a special solo set from the dean of the scene, JOE POTTS. With a full-on, turn-everything-on aesthetic and an array of chopped electronics, he opens the show sculpting with saturation, charting threshold topographies that approach totality.

MSHR photo by Walter Wlodarczyk
The Tenses Photo by Fredrik Nilsen