Sarah Davachi - Cantus, Descant (2020) [Official Digital Download]

The new Sarah Davachi record is an 80 minute, 17 track double album meditation on impermanence and endings, framed by minimalistic organ études and careful harmonic layering. On two tracks the artist’s own vocals are also heard for the first time. This is the first release on the artist’s own label, Late Music.

Just as we thought Sarah Davachi couldn't tug our heartstrings any harder, she inaugurates her new label Late Music with "Cantus, Descant", a two LP set containing some of the wooziest, most affecting organ music we've heard to date. The entire album is an exploration of the unique, individual character of her instruments as she harnesses the power of various pipe organs in Canada, Europe and the USA as well as the electric organ, Mellotron and a handful of other elements. This gives the tracks an impossibly human feel as subtle tones wind and fall with elegance, and unpredictable grace. It's not even that Davachi is exactly attempting to center her work as anathema to a world fogged by emotionally empty scambient and bone-dry modular drone, but these tracks are so animated that it's hard not to feel awed by what's so often missing.

'The Pelican' is an early highlight, using the Mellotron's unmistakable tape loops to add a layer of Morricone-esque melancholy to the mix. Elsewhere, album centerpiece 'Play The Ghost' drowns echoing vocals in reverb, sounding like distant prog-gaze beamed in from another parallel timeline. "Cantus, Descant" is a special album, whisper soft but pointed and intentional. Sarah Davachi is among the most gifted composers operating right now and this album is a celebration of the old and the new that speaks assuredly to the complex simplicity of tone itself. We're floored.

Tracklist:
1. Stations II (05:48)
2. The Pelican (05:50)
3. Ruminant (03:01)
4. Still Lives (04:27)
5. Stations V (03:59)
6. Midlands (09:45)
7. Play The Ghost (05:01)
8. Stations IV (03:19)
9. Passing Bell (01:25)
10. Hanging Gardens (05:49)
11. Stations I (02:36)
12. Gold Upon White (06:46)
13. Oldgrowth (03:49)
14. Stations III (03:49)
15. Canyon Walls (04:39)
16. Badlands (04:46)
17. Diaphonia Basilica (05:47)


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