"Epic drone experiment from US composer ... Lucy Railton's cello provides a constant service, the physical mechanics of her playing setting the measure of passing time, into which the other players can offer colour and contrast. Malone's sine-wave oscillators often provide a glassy ambience like Tibetan payer bowls ... The group merge into a considerate ebbing unit, a storm glowering overhead which never fully bursts ... Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley's fruity feedback guitar (...) growls menacingly ("v3"), bays for release ("v1"), and sometimes escapes altogether (as in "v2", which might be the most enjoyably dynamic of the takes). If "Sacrificial Code" could sometimes feel as if it was dance music without the repetition, here the music feels like a version of psychedelic rock; breaking on through to the other side, just without a conventional song. As occasional clanks and thuds remind us, this is longform music made in real time, rather than an infinite Eno-esque algorithm"

"Presented as a sprawling three-hour epic, the composer's drone piece for guitar, cello, and sine wave oscillators seeks new rhythms within the interminable sweep of pandemic time ... Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward. Just beneath the surface of Malone's composition lies an alternate path forward: one that is malleable, defined by change and the mysterious complexities of sound"

"Stockholm-based American continues her long-form harmonic studies: Since her 2017 debut, 'Velocity Of Sleep', Kali Malone has used pipe organs, trombones and analogue synthesizers to explore the wonders of just intonation and non-linear composition. For this epic three-hour work, she employs a sine-wave oscillator, exploring slowly evolving harmonies that interlink with Stephen O'Malley's vast guitarscapes and Lucy Railton's droning cello. How and what the three instruments are doing technically - their interlaced harmonic patterns of drone and feedback reverberating in empty concert halls - is perhaps less important than its powerful effect; a hypnotically shifting, blurring series of almost tangible sonic panoramas that simultaneous disorientate and beguile"

"This collection might be Malone's most potent concoction yet. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is Malone's first album on Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ label. In his main band, experimental doom/drone metal outfit Sunn O))), O'Malley erects forbidding monolithic pillars that rise and crumble with shifting chords. As one of Does Spring Hide Its Joy's two featured collaborators, his electric guitar's saturation, overtones and distortion provide fullness to Malone and cellist Lucy Railton's mutating circuitry ... While this record will challenge some, adventurous listeners will need no backstory to appreciate Does Spring Hide Its Joy's dark, alien majesty. Despite complex construction that in the wrong hands can drain music of potency and impact, Malone, Railton and O'Malley sculpt otherworldly soundscapes and craft microtonal realms worth return expeditions"