Sarah Davachi

Artist: Sarah Davachi
ReleaseProduct: Sarah Davachi Essential Bundle
Label: Late Music
Release Date: February 7, 2025

Bundle:

$84.99
- Antiphonals Vinyl, 1×LP, Limited Coloured Silver vinyl
- Two Sisters Vinyl, 2×LP, Limited Coloured Dark green vinyl
- The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir Vinyl, 2×LP
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Sarah Davachi takes stock of the last five years or so with this new Essential Bundle on her own Late Music imprint. Starting with 2021’s Antiphonals, Davachi has devoted most of her solo offerings to bridging the gap between classical and contemporary musical practices. Recording in churches and other cavernous spaces, space and silence have played as key a role in the three masterful albums showcased here just as much as the pipe organs, mellotrons, strings, and other sound elements utilised during recording. By combining modern day technology with medieval instrumentation, Davachi has created a body of work here that stands out of time. While ambient in some sense, this is music that doesn’t fade into the background so much as shape whatever room it's heard within.

Antiphonals kicks off this bundle, and it's a prime entry point into this period of music from the Calgary born and Los Angeles based composer. Recorded entirely with mellotrons, synths, harpsichords, organs, and pianos this record bears the sonic signifiers of devotional music, but applied to a secular framework. Minimalist figures like La Monte Young have traversed similar paths before, but Davachi provides a singularly intimate path into this sonic world. Tracks like the tape-hissed ‘Gradual of Image’ offer a home demo recording like atmosphere for music that explores motifs from centuries before the technology even existed.

2022’s Two Sisters follows, pulling away some of the synths in favour of a purer focus on 18th-century pipe organs, strings, and mellotrons. The end result is a much moodier affair. Utilising drone techniques more than the careful playing on prior efforts, Davachi pulls mournful tones out of the organs and mellotrons, exploring themes of loss and pain with music that hues closer to the cavernous dark of the spaces in which it was recorded. There’s still plenty of sonic space for the medieval too though, as the dual ‘Icon Studies’ movements resemble something like experimental drone hymnals.

The final piece of this Essential Bundle is 2024’s The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir. Expanding her normal solitary practice to incorporate a string quartet, Davachi uses the extra muscle to set music by epic Greek myths, namely those of Orpheus and Eurydice. The darker drones explored on Two Sister return here, but they’re propped up against string arrangements that provide more movement and rhythmic heft. Chorale vocals, synths, and other instruments also return to the fold here alongside the pipe organs as well, making for a strong closing statement that closes the loop on this “loose trilogy” of albums.