Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece that features Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. She created it between March and May of 2020, during an unsettling period of the pandemic.
Malone found herself in Berlin with a great deal of time and conceptual space to consider new compositional methods, and she was invited to the Berlin Funkhaus to record new music within the empty concert halls. She took this opportunity to form a small ensemble with her close friends, including Railton and O’Malley, to explore these new structural ideas within those various acoustic spaces.
“Like most of the world, my perception of time went through a significant transformation during the pandemic confinements of spring 2020. Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight,” Malone says. “Time stood still until subtle shifts in the environment suggested there had been a passing….playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.”
The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition, we’re told, with a “heightened focus” on just intonation. While the music is distinctly Malone’s sonic palette, she composed specifically for the techniques of O’Malley and Railton, “presenting a framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement throughout the music.”
Does Spring Hide Its Joy follows Malone’s The Sacrificial Code, on Ideal Recordings in 2019, and Living Torch, on Portraits GRM earlier this year.
The album actually just three one-hour tracks, but it has been split into nine segments for DSPs. It’s mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Mastering.
Tracklisting
01. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v1.1 02. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v1.2 03. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v1.3
04. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.1 05. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.2 06. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.3
07. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v1 08. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2 09. Does Spring Hide Its Joy v3
Does Spring Hide Its Joy LP is scheduled for January 20 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.3” in full via the player below, and pre-order here.
