Unlike an old-fashioned phone call, where there are potentially several rings for anticipation, Zoom meetings just start.
In a very binary, off-on fashion, suddenly, someone simply appears on your screen, which moments before was merely a blank space. Right on time this particular morning, that someone is Sarah Davachi, the celebrated artist whose durational musical works have captivated lovers of modern classical, ambient, and drone composition for a long while.
Reclining on a chesterfield in her living room, Davachi speaks to me in Montreal from her home in Los Angeles, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D., on the occasion of the total solar eclipse, an auspicious if fleeting sliver of history. Behind her, a Black Sabbath poster is tacked to the wall, a trivial clue that speaks volumes to the depth and breadth of generic influences that have filtered over time into her work.
“My brother was born in the ’70s, so he listened to a lot of classic rock,” Davachi divulges.
“I got really into Metallica when I was in 7th grade. I remember listening to …And Justice for All on my discman and being so blown away by all the detail.”
If there is one thread that runs through all of Davachi’s compositions, it’s an acute attention to detail. Timbral detail; temporal detail.
“The music that I make is very minimalist in style,” Davachi explains. “It removes a lot of melody and rhythm. Part of that is to bring the focus to the texture of the sound and the harmonics that are happening in any given moment. The time aspect was a necessity to make that happen. In order to hear overtones and things like that, you need to let a sound continue without moving to the next thing. It needs that time to actually unfold.”
On the surface, it may sound to the casual listener in pieces like 2022’s single “En Bas Tu Vois,” or “Magdalena,” from her critically lauded 2021 recording entitled Antiphonals, that there is not that much happening.
But beneath their austere veneer, oceans of complexity begin to emerge in these works in the form of microtonal variations, resonant harmonics, and apparent temporal distortions. In the tradition of venerated composers like Gavin Bryars and Max Richter, Davachi has the rare and uncanny ability with her music to stretch out a listener’s perception of time.
“In my lifetime,” Davachi says, “it feels like there’s a lot of push for things to happen quickly — not even for things to be experienced but just glimpsed at. If you go to a museum or something, it’s very unusual for people to spend even a minute looking at a specific painting. You’re just walking through and not actually looking at anything. With durational music, it’s almost like showing a painting in bits as opposed to showing the entire thing all at once. You have this control over the listener, being able to slow them down deliberately and force them to go slow. It changes the way you hear things. It changes your brain. I think that’s important, psychologically, for people.”
It’s clear that Davachi meditates, perhaps obsessively, on her work, and specifically, about how her audience receives it. She began studying piano in the Royal Conservatory system as a child, and majored, appropriately, in philosophy and music as an undergrad at the University of Calgary. “The philosophical side was informing a lot of how I thought about music,” she says.
Davachi enrolled in an electroacoustic music class and soon became enamoured with the process of layering performances and mixing recordings. “For me, it made a lot of sense,” she says. “That got me really interested in composing.”
In 2007, Davachi began working at the National Music Centre where she was introduced to a museum-full of organs, synthesizers, and various other claviocentric instruments, which were capable of prolonging sound beyond the piano’s limitations.
“Discovering that way of making music opened the door to being able to do music in a way that I wanted to,” she recalls. “It was ironic,” she laughs, “because for me, music was the sensible alternative to doing a philosophy degree.”
After graduation, Davachi was accepted to the prestigious electronic music program at Mills College in Oakland, California, where noted musicians like Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne had served as faculty members. She divulges, “That’s where it started with the music that I make now.”
Early in her professional career, Davachi took the conscious decision to forgo a life of performing live. “I just hated the pressure,” she confesses. “In classical music, the performance is everything. You have to get it right, and you only get one shot. If you screw up, that’s that. To me, that’s not how I think about music.”
Instead, Davachi began devoting herself to the granular levels of control that the studio-as-instrument can afford. She feels closest to the creative process when she is “taking things and sculpting them,” she says. “I learned how to make music in this electroacoustic way, and that still informs the way that I think about where my music exists. A lot of it happens in the compositional phase.”
Davachi will be in Montreal for the Suoni per il Popolo festival in June to attend the world premiere of a new work entitled “Three Unisons for Four Voices,” which the experimental ensemble No Hay Banda commissioned. The piece is a 65-minute composition for violin, cello, trombone, bass clarinet, ondes Martenot, and percussion.
“It’s split into three sections,” she tells me. “One of the things that I’m interested in is this way of having a certain piece of melody that repeats itself similarly to how sound-on-sound tape delay works. It repeats and it keeps repeating until it slowly starts breaking itself apart. I’m trying to do that in an acoustic way.”
Just as Davachi graciously and all too briefly occupies my screen on our Zoom call, her sumptuous and profound compositional works expand to inhabit whatever sonic spaces they’re in. And though her pieces extend beyond what might be considered acceptable running times for popular or even avant-garde music, they seem to end too soon. Elongating beautiful moments in musical time has always been a central tenet of Davachi’s modus operandi, starting with her earliest days as a pianist.
“When I played something, like a chord, I remember thinking that I would like to hear that more,” she recollects. “You’re playing and you get to a chord, and you have to keep going, because that’s the nature of the piano. I remember being annoyed thinking, ‘that’s such a pretty cadence, or a pretty harmony.’ I just wanted to hear that more.”◼︎
No Hay Banda performs Sarah Davachi’s “Three Unisons for Four Voices” for the Suoni per il Popolo festival 13 June at La Sala Rossa, 4848 St. Laurent Blvd.
Cover image: Sarah Davachi photographed in Los Angeles in 2020. Provided to NicheMTL by the artist.
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