In 2021, composer and organist Kali Malone was granted access to the chapel Temple de La Tour-de-Peilz in Switzerland, where she tuned the organ fitted with manual pumps. What followed was a series of experiments with cellist, composer and sound artist Leila Bordreuil, in which the two allowed their respective instruments to merge within the chapel’s resonance. Music for Intersecting Planes is the result of that site-specific encounter.
Performed in single takes by candlelight at night and recorded directly, the music balances between patience and intensity, composure and tension. Bowed strings, fading organ pipes and the chapel’s characteristic suspended acoustics unfold slowly and repeatedly gather into dense formations. Afterwards, silence interrupts the composition as air is pumped manually through the organ. Pitch and stability can therefore never be fully maintained. And yet Bordreuil’s improvised musical language on feedback cello merges here effortlessly with Malone’s sense of space and the resulting depth of meditative immersion. The surroundings, too, become part of the composition, whether in the ringing of church bells or the distant sound of engines.
Music for Intersecting Planes does not arise from perfection, but from mutual influence. It is precisely this interplay that makes the work a recording in which space, instrument and environment become equally audible.
