Vibrant, floating, yet relying on an endless drone somewhere below 100 Hz played by Kali Malone that’s what I can tell while listening to “Living Torch I” for the first time … then other sounds – played by Mats Äleklint on this Trombone and Isak Hedtjärn‘s Bass Clarinet – that slowly build up like waves on an ocean of drones … fantastic and almost magical!

Hermann Nitsch’s Orgelkonzert Jesuitenkirche 20.11.2013 came to my mind but this one here is different … other instruments and it’s not the Königin playing … but from what I have seen Kali Malon also composed music for Church Organs – another topic that will need to be checked out.

This album which plays slightly longer than half an hour is a source for inspiration and exploration as it has some remarkable aspects that lead to interesting facts in the history of electronic music.

Acousmonium Loudspeaker System
Habe ich keinen linked in his review of “Living Torch” to he English Wikipedia entry about this speaker system. Although my French only being good enough to understand vital aspects of my daily work the French Wikipedia article on the Acousmonium offers more in depth details about this sound diffusion system designed in 1974 by Francois Bayle.
Linked there is a PDF by Jonathan Prager entitled “L’INTERPRETATION ACOUSMATIQUE – fondements artistiques et techniques de l’interpretation des œuvres acousmatiques en concert” where on page 13 you can see a drawing showing such an installation as it was used in 2012.

ARP 2500
The ARP 2500 is a quite rare monophonic analog modular synthesizer from the 1970-ies. Only about 100 of these have been built. A modern but 100% compatible version of the ARP 2500 is being built by French company MOS LAB.
Notable users include Kraftwerk (sic!), Elton John, David Bowie, Jean-Michel Jarre, The Who and cEvin Key to name just a few 🙂

Pure Data
Not really part of the history of electronic music but this software was also used by Kali Malon in the making of “Living Torch”.

About Pure Data (aka “Pd” / “Pd Vanilla”)

Pure Data (or just “Pd”) is an open source visual programming language for multimedia. Pure Data is developed by Miller Puckette since 1996 and you can find it on his official website along with the official documentation and other related resources. This is the official “Pd” or “main distribution” and it is also known as “Pd Vanilla”, but there are other forks or “flavours”.

Source: http://puredata.info/

Also worth a look is the Wikipedia article on Pure Data.

Boîte à Bourdons
The Boîte à Bourdons or BAB might be the strangest instrument I have ever seen and heard … I found a nice page from France that belongs to instrument maker Léo Maurel who offers pictures of the instrument as well as a 5 min long sample of the instrument being played.

Links
Kali Malone’s homepage can be found here.
Get the album directly from Bandcamp … https://kalimalone.bandcamp.com/album/living-torch … unfortunately the only options are download or CD as there are no vinyl records of this album available.