Does Spring Hide Its Joy
Released
Depending which version you listen to, this piece is either two, three, or five hours long. Malone is here on synth, Lucy Railton is on cello, and Stephen O’Malley is on electric guitar. What the music sounds like is a very long shout out to La Monte Young and Eliane Radigue, what with the extremely long pieces that hover near one pitch and slowly add harmonics and microtonal adjustments. Like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, this seems forbidding and long until you get all the way through it and then you can’t listen to anything else for a few days. There are no real “high points,” as the music is in such close conversation with itself. I don’t recommend splitting it into pieces—let it work on you.