Sarah Davachi - Vergers

Pitchfork 75

Like a lot of minimalist art, Sarah Davachi’s music appears simple on the surface. Not a lot seems to happen, at least not in terms of melody, rhythm, or any of the usual categories of Western popular music: Her music consists mainly of long held tones. The real action is not found in the notes themselves but in their microtonal variations and the wealth of overtones, harmonics, and ghostly pulses produced by the friction between them. Her work belongs to a tradition of deep, shimmering drone music that includes Eliane Radigue, Kevin Drumm, Phill Niblock, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and Folke Rabe.

Despite its apparent restraint, Davachi’s music is also profoundly expressive. Her filters sweep back and forth in slow, deliberate, and often unpredictable movements that suggest the careful thought process that drives the hand behind them. The subtlest change can set in motion complicated chain reactions—ebbing and flowing, wheels turning within wheels. Play her music in a quiet room on good speakers and you can practically see the air moving around your head.

In part, this has to do with her tools. Davachi, who studied electronic music at Mills College, in Oakland, California, typically works with a mixture of acoustic and electronic sources, or even purely acoustic instruments. Her album All My Circles Run, from earlier this year, is a set of studies for overdubbed strings, voice, organ, and piano. On Vergers, she turns her attention to the EMS Synthi 100, an analog synthesizer from the early 1970s, and complements its unusually vibrant tone with almost imperceptible additions of voice and violin.

It is her most minimal album yet. Its three long tracks initially feel almost static; they evolve so stealthily that it's easy to find yourself adrift in the middle, wondering just how you got there. The opening “Gentle So Gentle,” nearly 22 minutes long, begins with a single octave, its tones wavering like heat mirages. A minute passes; then two. It takes a while to notice a pair of quiet background tones, glowing like street lights in fog. In time, it will come to feel like all seven notes of a minor scale are resonating in blurry unison. Timbres shift; tones fatten. For a spell, the sound resembles a piano whose sustain pedal has been held down. Then, a pair of clarinets. Fifteen minutes in, and the atmosphere turns celestial for its final passage. The piece begins on a different note than the one with which it began, and even though you probably won't notice it, that shift lends an extra element of tension. There is no resolution; it is a question with no answer, an imperative to keep moving.

Where “Gentle So Gentle” is shot through with light, “Ghosts and All” is charged with dread. Over buzzing pedal tones, thin, violin-like textures saw queasily back and forth, like a camera panning across a burned forest. It is as bleak as the grimmest doom metal. Once again, she proves herself a master manipulator of frequency, stacking up layers until even the root note is lost in the miasma, and you're left disoriented, unable to find your footing.

The third and final track, “In Staying,” uses similar strategies, but it's immediately distinguishable from its companions. (Proof that Davachi is not your average drone artist is her facility for evoking wildly different universes with such a modest set of tools.) The sound evokes church bells that have been frozen in mid-peal. New tones bleed into earshot, and the bells melt away. Now we are inside a glacier, perhaps; the time scale is unfathomably long. Inside the sound, made one with the all-encompassing hum, a million tiny vibrations collide. If timbre is one of Davachi’s primary materials, time is another—thus her all-enveloping matrix of infinite ripple—and with “In Staying,” she manages a feat that is nearly impossible in music: She makes time itself seem to stand stock still.