Sarah Davachi - Selected Works ISelected Works I & II '2023

Tracks list

Sarah Davachi provides a shortcut to the sublime with 90 minutes of head
stroking quiet music - simply unmissable for acolytes of Éliane Radigue, La
Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, Kevin Drumm, Andrew Chalk, AFX’s 2nd
ambient set The 10-part retrospective ’Selected Works I & II’ is
an ideal way to mark 10 years of releases by composer Sarah Davachi, whose
blessed run of recordings of rare, quiet intensity hold among the past
decade’s definitive lowkey works. As her legion followers will surely
attest, Davachi’s music is possessed of a deeply uncanny potential to
mesmerise and transport the mind to other places, following extended lines of
melodic and harmonic thought, rooted in early music, chamber classical, and
C.20th American minimalism, to the gauziest, most seductive new horizons of
timbre and psychoacoustics. As with her live shows, Davachi’s recorded
music operates at, or just below, the speed of resting thought, with a
life-affirming ability to sync one’s senses to hers, prompting the
imagination to follow its own nose to wherever it goes. To attentively listen to
her work can result in genuine, unfettered zen-like or immanent experience,
untroubled by the musical clutter that can distract or more plainly signpost
emotions, and give listeners a thruline to the sublime, as felt strongly on
‘Selected Works I & II’, Drawn from material that predates her
debut ‘The Untuning of the Sky’ (2013), and also hail from it, as
well as excerpted from subsequent live recordings, tape and CD releases, and a
precious trove of unreleased work; it all adds up to the sort of release we
would direct newcomers as a perfect primer or portal to Davachi’s world.
The calming course of ‘Alms Vert’ opens this set, as it did her
debut, staking out her fluency of ancient instrumental tongue in contemporary
vernacular, while the just intoned drone of ‘In Grand Luxe Hall’
places her in a live context, exploring links between architecture,
psychoacoustics, and spirit that ideally reveals the teeth to her music, somehow
akin to the drone chronics of Catherine Christer Hennix. The
‘Gathers’ parts from her lockdown tape for our Documenting Sound
series characterises a contemporary porousness to noise and natural world, while
the incremental shifts of ‘Neustadt’ proves how her music benefits
from durational immersion, but likewise enchants in short form on the exquisite
‘First Triad’ and the beatific ‘A Woman Escapes Cue
4’.


Tracklist:

Selected Works I
1.01 - Sarah Davachi - Alms Vert (12:01)
1.02 - Sarah Davachi - In The Grand Luxe Hall (Excerpt) (10:57)
1.03 - Sarah Davachi - In The Littlefield Choir Lift (Excerpt) (12:09)
1.04 - Sarah Davachi - Gathers IV (10:50)

Selected Works II
1.01 - Sarah Davachi - First Triad (3:38)
1.02 - Sarah Davachi - A Woman Escapes Cue 4 (5:35)
1.03 - Sarah Davachi - Neustadt (11:44)
1.04 - Sarah Davachi - Composition Of Flowers (Excerpt) (6:21)
1.05 - Sarah Davachi - Olsun (7:51)
1.06 - Sarah Davachi - Gathers VI (7:22)

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