Sarah Davachi (born 1987)
Sarah Davachi was born in Calgary. She graduated from the University of Calgary, and has a master’s degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College. She is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA.
Sarah Davachi composes glacially meditative electro-acoustic music with a focus on timbre. Although she has written compositions for various chamber ensembles, much of her music is for organ often used as a nascent synthesizer, with and without various types of electronic accompaniment. She has released ten full-length albums of her music and often performs live.
Her website describes her work as
concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. Her compositions span both solo and chamber ensemble formats, incorporating a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation. Similarly informed by minimalist and long-form tenets, early music concepts of intervallic and modal harmony, as well as experimental production practices of the electroacoustic studio environment, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and the distant.
“Instrumental II” is the second of three videos created by Sarah Davachi last year. In this one she plays a classic Hammond B-3 organ from 1957 and demonstrates what the instrument really sounds like if we truly listen to it rather than just passively hearing it.
This is one of a series of concerts hosted by the Experimental Sound Studio called The Quarantine Concerts. It was recorded on April 7, 2020: