Antiphonals (2021)
Sarah Davachi
Sarah Davachi has been releasing music since 2013, and in that time has become one of the more widely admired composers in contemporary ambient music. Davachi’s career is layered with innovation, with her most recent albums exploring the process of recording in different spaces and how that alters the sonic details of her music. Many of her songs are titled in Latin and include biblical themes, which is reflective of her appreciation for the acoustics in spacious cathedrals rather than organized religion. On her latest album, Antiphonals, the Los Angeles-based composer replicates minimalist classical arrangements through a Mellotron synthesizer and vintage organs.
(Pictured Above: Sarah Davachi)
Every album that Sarah Davachi composes, she also distributes through her own label, Late Music. It is an imprint of Warp Records, a well-known label, that has also remained independent since its beginning. Compared to Warp’s roster and other imprints, Late Music is relatively obscure, but undoubtedly a calculated partnership. Davachi’s influence reaches far beyond her own music, as she has a hand in curating a number of music installations for fine art institutions such as the National Music Centre in Canada & The Banff Centre for the Arts. In this regard, she has contributed as an esteemed musicologist and auditory researcher in the academic world of sound.
While some of her best work is characterized by bright high-pitched synthesizers, Antiphonals echoes quieter and darker drone compositions. The biggest difference between her previous compositions and the majority of her latest record is the volume levels of each arrangement. Davachi’s entire record explores the benefits of large recording spaces, so while it sounds hushed, even the quietest sections are full. A strong example of this intense minimalism is “Magdalena” (above), which runs across ten minutes of understated chords that rarely change. The lack of variations in this composition truly shines around the seven minute mark when she adds a layer of reverberating drone that is slightly higher pitched than the track’s leading synthesizer. With this subtle addition, there is a noticeable increase in vibrancy, giving the entire composition a hypnotic build.
Davachi has a background in music history, so the nods to archetypal eras of forgotten genres are fascinating. There are elements of Medieval-era music in tracks such as “Gradual of Image” (below) specifically in the repetitive guitar melody that the rest of the piece centers itself around. As the melody repeats over the first minute, a rising synthesizer drone begins to unfold over it. The ambient layer gradually becomes brighter by the end of the composition, shifting the direction of the recording from mysteriously dark to blissful in a matter of three minutes. Davachi is at her strongest through her well-timed but miniscule additions to leading melodies that force the listener to remain engaged, while still recognizing any significant chord changes.
The album highlight is one of the darker tracks, “Abeyant” (below), which features a strong balance of shaking extended notes underneath an improvised piano melody. Similar to “Gradual of Image,” the track begins with nearly three minutes of standalone sporadic piano melodies. During the barren opening minutes, Davachi quietly adds reverb to the piano, but it doesn’t become discernible until the one minute mark. Davachi’s use of common effects are hidden well, but they impact and redirect the course of each composition. To put this in perspective, she creates the perfect counterbalance between the track’s dueling melodies by slowly removing the piano around the five minute mark, and then fades the remainder of the song out with the second vibrating drone.
By definition, antiphonal music is when two separate vocals interact, such a religious call and response chant that alternates between a religious leader and their congregation. Although vocal chants do not appear on this record, Davachi evokes emotion with the most trembling tones of her career. The second to last track on the record is the awe-inspiring “Rushes Recede,” which develops with restraint, but ultimately incorporates more layers of instrumentation than the surrounding songs. There is a linear comparison to the way Antiphonals is built around cathedral acoustics and binaural recordings, which are pitches that have been scientifically proven to soothe the mind. Davachi never specifies what emotional reaction she intends to provoke from this album, but in applying the call and response concept of antiphonals to ambient music, she has synthesized a therapeutic middle ground between spiritual settings and the effects of binaural music.
(Video: Sarah Davachi, “Border of Mind”; dir by Sarah Davachi)
©Total Trash Ltd, 2021
