Sarah Davachi - All My Circles Run

Pitchfork 73

The ambient music that Sarah Davachi makes is profoundly thermal. Thick and sonorous, it pushes up, welling up from silence, weaving harmoniums, string instruments, and electronics together in ways that feel indivisible, if not eternal. And even where her recordings bring slightly different pressures to bear—the soft, rippling Barons Court, the sloshy, church-organ languor of Dominions—the overall effect is similar: a benign hypnosis, the will to dissipate, a gentle weightlessness. To succumb to any entry in the Vancouver composer’s growing discography is to wade idly into the surf at low tide, only to suddenly find yourself 15 yards away from the shore.

Synthesizers—Rolands, Buchlas, EMSs—have been integral to Davachi’s sound since The Untuning of the Sky, her 2013 debut. Now, in an aesthetic dare worthy of two successive flips of an Oblique Strategies card, All My Circles Run goes synth-free, with each of its five tracks (largely) centered on a separate instrument.

Circularity is embraced wholeheartedly here. “For Voice” swirls an angelic multi-track chorus into a gorgeously smothering aria, as vocal iterations seize, then relinquish the foreground as if in a slow-motion round; the slow-drawn scrape that opens “For Strings” yields to a braided, harmonized drone. After interlocking a frayed, reverberating series of guitar figures destined to disintegrate over time, “Chanter” undercuts its own meditative drift with a two-note, interrogative counterpoint. “For Piano”—all aching, pecked tones, enervating whirr, and field-recorded backdrop pacing circuits—recalls Sontag Shogun, a Brooklyn-based trio who commingle elements of classical and carefully-chosen samples into something mournfully beautiful. Even with the new focus, this version of Davachi isn't a fundamentally altered one—her meditative warmth remains intact.

The real shift is one of artistic precision and a sense of amplification. Instead of viewing a passing scene out the window, we're looking now at the world through a microscope. That's especially true on “For Organ,” the album’s true centerpiece. Kneading and pitch-shifting wobbly, revolving tones until only a ringing, hypnotic din remains, the song seems to crack itself open and flood with brilliant melodic light; it brings to mind, ironically, Matmos’ synth-opus Supreme Balloon. On that record, Matmos temporarily set aside conceptual pranks to embrace the synthesizer's possibilities; the result was music achingly beautiful and crystalline, winking just slightly. With Circles, an insidious, sublime gambit that pays off handsomely, Davachi’s particular asceticism achieves a similar effect by pulling in an alternate direction. Like Brian Eno at his solo best, it's the sort of ambience that doesn't flood, that hovers precariously somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, barely-there and indisputably present.