Sarah Davachi: Moving Between Worlds
Canadian minimalist Sarah Davachi’s love for the pipe organ has defined her music: dramatic, ambitious and physical. On her latest album, she weaves modern electronics with these centuries-old instruments to create a vast, layered world of her own
When Sarah Davachi sat down in the Église du Gesù church in Toulouse, France, last October, she was enveloped in darkness. Echoing through the sonorous room was the sound of droning keys, bellowing from the pipe organ she was playing. “I looked out and it was this sea of blackness,” she remembers. “It was quite scary but it was also, for lack of a better word, a vibe.”
One year later, this vibe can be heard on Night Horns, the closing track of Davachi’s latest album, The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir. The 23-minute piece is as much a recording of the room as it is of the instrument; Davachi composed and recorded the song in the church, the music soaking up the atmosphere of its eerie surroundings, and vice versa.
“Certain rooms have a feeling, and you can capture the sense of how the sound is sitting in a space like that,” she explains, from her home in Los Angeles. “It’s something I try to bring into the music, even in ways that are not going to be perceptible to people. You wouldn’t know from listening to it that nobody was there, and that it was done in darkness,” she continues, “but for me, it creates a different kind of hollowness that I could feel.”
The organ in that neo-Gothic church in Toulouse is one of several instruments that feature on Davachi’s new album. Three other organs take centre stage: The famous instrument in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, a Gothic Roman Catholic wonder in Bologna, Italy; the untraditional organ belonging to the modern, copper-roofed Temppeliaukio Church of Helsinki, Finland; and the renaissance-style organ in the Medieval-inspired Fairchild Chapel at Oberlin College, Ohio.
Not only did Davachi mic up these rooms, to capture the organ and the space interacting, she also recorded the instruments’ pedals; capturing the mechanical function of air being released from the valves and floating into and out of the pipes. Opportunities to play these rare, singular instruments are usually tied into concerts or residences, so throughout the years, Davachi has made the most of being around them. “I try to record everything I do, just in case,” she says. “A weird, random organ can sound amazing, but it’s often very difficult to get back to play again.”
On The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, the organs are played alongside Davachi’s Prophet 5 and Korg PS-3100 synthesisers, Mellotron and Korg CX-3 electric organ. The album is something of a hybrid approach to compositional styles that Davachi has been utilising and expanding on throughout her recording career; in the last ten years, Davachi has released 11 studio albums, numerous EPs, three collaborative albums and several film and TV scores.
This approach involves blending her fixed electroacoustic pieces with more open-form ‘chamber writing’. The former are ostensibly studio pieces that are recorded, layered and edited, while chamber writing refers to pieces that she notates for others to perform live, usually without her present. For her latest album, the track Res Sub Rosa was composed for a wind quintet from Berlin’s Harmonic Space Orchestra, with Davachi creating a variable structure that allowed players some discretion and control in how the piece was shaped.
Similarly, Possente Spirto welcomed the musicians to respond in real-time to the music – to “engage in a more direct form of listening” – while the more solo, organ-centric pieces, such as Prologo, are examples of her more fixed electroacoustic approach. “While the studio pieces are unchanging and very precise in how and where things are placed, the chamber pieces tended to be much freer,” she explains.
This fusion of seemingly opposing styles is what makes Davachi such a unique composer. Her music feels otherworldly, but also incredibly specific and stuffed with personality. “My practice for the past several years hasn’t been about combining the two approaches necessarily,” she explains, “but rather about exploring where they naturally tend to overlap; how they speak to each other, and to see what’s in there. I wouldn’t say I’ve landed on a new style of composition, but this approach allows me to capture what I see as the best of both worlds: the timbral detail and intimacy of my studio work, and the durational pacing and time manipulation of my live work.”
“For the kind of music I want to make, and the way I think about sound, the organ is the most logical instrument. It feels the most intuitive. The piano felt like the wrong instrument for me”
Thrown into the mix are some pretty obscure references, too. The ancient Greek myth of Orpheus appears via two key influences on the album: Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, a 17th-century baroque opera. Davachi was taken with the melancholic tone of the sonnets and liked the idea of gently incorporating the feel of that into the music. Davachi saw a live staging of L’Orfeo and was blown away by it. “It was so minimal, surreal, almost eerie in its design and choreography,” she remembers.
“It framed the music and its meaning in a completely novel way. That made me consider narrative differently, in a way that I hadn’t done in my own work much previously.” More than that, it was the stories that Davachi connected with. “Without sounding super emo about it, there’s something so sad, melancholic and human about the story of Orpheus. This wasn’t necessarily about making [the album] sad, but to give it an austere emotional dissonance.”
Growing up in Calgary, Canada, Davachi was taught classical piano, but by her teens, she was pulling away from the more conventional tenets of the instrument. “I never felt a super-close connection to the piano,” she admits, “and I hated performing in the classical sense. That’s the thing that I think is evil; all the focus being on this one performance where the stakes are super high, and if you make a mistake, you’ve ruined the whole thing. That’s the antithesis of what performance should be, so I wanted to push away from that aspect of it.”
At 20, Davachi had a breakthrough when she landed a job as a tour guide at the National Music Centre in Calgary. She would arrive early and dedicate time alone to learning specific instruments; she fell in love with synths as much as she did harpsichords and organs. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is what I’ve been looking for,’” she says. “For the kind of music I want to make, and the way I think about sound, the organ is the most logical instrument. It feels the most intuitive. The piano felt like the wrong instrument for me.”
Davachi would go on to study a PhD in Musicology at UCLA in California, which is ongoing, but she can link her appreciation for a given instrument’s potential back to that job she had at such a formative age. To Davachi, they are not just tools or accessories. “I think of them as like people, as cringy as that sounds,” she says. “When you get to know an instrument, it’s like getting to know a person; you have to take the time, you have to put in the effort to understand what that relationship is going to be.”
Being around so many sonic possibilities at Calgary’s National Music Centre also allowed Davachi to understand the importance of a ‘less is more’ approach. While her music can feel vast and detailed, with its slow-burn flow that merges rich harmonic structures with a deep exploration of timbre, it never feels gimmicky or forced. “It’s one of the reasons why I’ve stayed out of the whole Eurorack [modular synthesiser] world,” she says. “I feel like there’s this constant push towards what’s new, and how can we add this thing or change that thing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it results in people looking at an instrument or a piece of equipment and saying, ‘OK, I did what I could with it, but what’s next?’”
Instead, she enjoys the analogue sound and feel of the pipe organ: “You don’t need to have all these complicated things happening. I haven’t gotten tired of that yet.” And while Davachi’s work is gradual in its pace – no track on the new album is shorter than nine minutes – there’s an important distinction to be made that she feels is sometimes missing: ambient, this is not. “There’s nothing wrong with ambient music, but I don’t see my own music in that way,” she explains.
“I think about ambient music in the traditional definition: music that you can as easily pay attention to as you can ignore. A lot of minimal music gets incorrectly categorised as ambient because it’s hard to listen to something that’s so reduced, slow and minimal. You really have to go to a different place, mentally and physically, to listen to it. So, a lot of music gets done a disservice by saying you don’t really have to pay attention to it. I want people to listen to it.”
Davachi’s work possesses that rare ability to operate on both micro and macro levels; of exploring physical and psychic spaces, and dealing with tiny details and expansive landscapes. The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir makes you feel as though you’re rattling around inside a pipe organ one minute, then floating through air the next. It’s less music for airports, more organ music for pitch-black French churches in the dead of night.
The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir is out now on Late Music and Warp Records
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