Does Spring Hide Its Joy (2022)
Film
Duration 10 minutes, Super 8 color 4/3, original soundtrack by Kali Malone featuring Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton
Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive audio experience by American composer Kali Malone featuring musicians Stephen O'Malley and Lucy Railton. Manifesting as a 4-day multichannel sound installation, Malone offers a deep listening environment in a hydraulic tower and engine house in Birkenhead Docks. Does Spring Hide Its Joy was created and recorded in the empty Berlin Funkhaus & Monom during the lockdown of spring 2020. The music is a study in long-form, non-linear durational composition, with a heightened focus on septimal just intonation and beating interference patterns.
Originally designed by engineer Jesse Hartley in 1868, the Central Hydraulic Tower and Engine House is based on the Palazzo Vecchio, a renaissance cavern in Florence, Italy. Bombed during World War II, the iconic nineteenth-century Grade II listed building has been left unused for decades. In this empty chamber of industrial energy, Malone's durational composition breathes and bellows through porous brick walls, reverberating toward the surface of dockland waters.
This film was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices and funded by Arts Council England. It was selected in International Competition at Videoex Festival 2024 (Zurich) in the New Kind of Poetry section. Assistant director: Sweatmother.
Excerpt from Does Spring Hide Its Joy