Bleep

Gave In Rest

In addition to her current studies at UCLA, regarding the aesthetic impact of timbral quality in early and experimental music, Sarah Davachi’s latest LP stems from a summer touring Europe, attempting to glean from her alien surroundings a musical propinquity that embodied both the sensitive and ephemeral condition of her emotional disposition at that point. The haunting character of her experiments in electroacoustic composition often contains a combination of pipe and reed organs, tape-replay samples, analogue synthesizers and orchestral strings. ‘Gave In Rest’ delicately moves listeners with evocative shifts in temperment, simple structures that emphasise small alterations in resonance and intonation.

Pale Bloom

The ‘Perfumes’ suite that makes up Pale Bloom’s first half is particularly notable for its use of the piano. Album opener ‘Perfumes 1’ consists almost totally of slow, mournful keyboard lines. When augmented by some techniques from Davachi’s book of sound-art tricks - reversed samples, suspended harmony - the effect is akin to something from J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier as reimagined by Jonny Greenwood. While still rooted in the piano, ‘Perfumes 2’ and ‘Perfumes 3’ have a little more going on in their texture - in particular ‘2’, a piece whose warped-record choir sounds cast an unsettling spell similar to The Caretaker. Pale Bloom’s second half is taken up by ‘If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery’, a La Monte Young-esque organ exercise that has plenty in common with Davachi’s other recorded output.