The minimalist composer-performer’s slow, patient works demand and reward close attention; give them time, and their secrets will rise slowly to the surface.
In the December 1960 issue of Arts and Architecture, the critic Dore Ashton described the peculiar experience of encountering Ad Reinhardt’s “black paintings”—a series of 60 x 60” canvases that appear monochrome, but that reveal subtle, multicolored geometries upon close inspection. She suggested that they actively slowed the process of interpretation; you have to stare, hard, to find hints of color in the black. “How singular color can be when so proposed!” wrote Ashton. “How much more inexplicably moving the hue when it is magically coaxed out after long contemplation.”
The same could be said for the minimal drones of Sarah Davachi’s new album Cantus, Descant, which, on first blush, scans as her most imposing work to date. Clocking in at 81 minutes and 17 tracks, it’s the first release from Davachi’s new label, Late Music (a partner of Warp), and features recordings from no less than six different organs scattered across North America and Europe. These are long, sinewy pieces, carved from just a few components. They favor slow chord changes and arcane tonalities, and unlike Reinhardt’s paintings, they’re fundamentally durational; like it or not, they demand a fixed amount of time. But there are also secrets lurking just under the surface, and a degree of complexity that’s part and parcel of the music’s stark appearance, like colors coaxed from the black.
The entry points shift across the album, but there’s always a way in. The chug of the reed organ on tracks like “Oldgrowth” and “Badlands” generates a persistent background rumble, evoking gentle motion, and the wispy “Passing Bell” folds in faint bells; “Ruminant,” one of the album’s most plainly inviting pieces, puts swells of violin at the fore, which offer an early reprieve. The pipe organ played on the “Stations” series uses meantone temperament, a tuning system typically associated with Renaissance music, lending it a veneer of familiarity, and conjuring images of sprawling, imagined cathedrals. “I like to think of sounds as these worlds that you enter into,” said Davachi in a 2015 interview. “Not as a form of escapism, but rather as an act of emotional or aesthetic disclosure.” Her brand of slow-moving minimalism is still mostly inscrutable, but these sorts of textural variations can feel like a form of disclosure—the vaguest suggestions, guiding us through—and make Cantus, Descant a deceptively generous project.
Davachi opens up even further on “Play The Ghost” and “Canyon Walls,” both of which feature her own vocals. In their delicate constitution and emphasis on individual syllables (they can feel like ASMR, at times), they’re reminiscent of Julia Holter, another LA-based composer with a soft spot for Renaissance music. And though Davachi’s lyrics aren’t quite as finely wrought as Holter’s, she has a knack for simple, evocative language. There’s a lovely line on “Canyon Walls” about “a longing to keep those birds/in their deep ruin green”; the meaning is elusive, but the undertones reverberate.
Davachi has been putting out music in this vein for the past few years, insisting on slowness and careful rumination across a range of instruments and electroacoustic modes. She’s scarily prolific (she’s released three EPs already this year), but with Cantus, Descant, Davachi has arrived at maybe her purest distillation of those ideals. The attention to detail is itself a kind of time warp; in its patient hold, the music becomes something entirely new.
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