Sarah Davachi: The Will of Tongues

Auden Alsop reviews Sarah Davachi’s The Will of Tongues as the culmination of years spent exploring historical instruments, alternative tuning systems, texture, and harmonic structure. The album uses reconstructed period winds, historically tuned organs, and an abstracted Renaissance choral form, with collaborators including Whitney Johnson, Eyvind Kang, and Lucy Railton. Running for more than two hours, the record makes duration central to its effect. Some pieces dwell in near-stasis, others explore stark organ counterpoint or the interaction between organ and strings. Alsop is especially moved by Songs of the Smile’s Fig, a six-part choral work based loosely on André Breton’s surrealist poem The Spectral Attitudes. For the critic, the album’s central concern is the difference between hearing and listening. Davachi does not consider this ambient music or a form of escape. Instead, The Will of Tongues asks for sustained attention, empathy, and time. That act of listening becomes a way of confronting presence, mortality, and our relationship to time. The closing Canto Solo begins with a single organ drone, grows richer in resonance, then ends abruptly rather than fading, leaving the listener suspended in the same questions about duration and mortality that run through the album.

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