The most ambitious work of Sarah Davachi's career to date. Spanning more than two hours of music across three LPs, The Will of Tongues arrives on the composer's own Late Music imprint as a vast, deeply considered statement - a meditation on the act of listening itself, and on the mental spaces that sound, given duration and reduction, continually opens.
Over the last decade, Davachi has emerged as one of the most singular voices working at the intersection of minimalism, early music, and electroacoustic practice - a composer whose work, from Let Night Come On Bells End the Day to The Head as Form'd in the Crier's Choir, has steadily deepened a personal idiom built on slow harmonic movement, just intonation, and a profound sensitivity to instruments as historical bodies. The Will of Tongues draws all of these threads into a single, sprawling architecture.
The album gathers five new solo compositions for historical pipe organs - recorded on instruments across the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands - alongside a suite of three choral pieces, a collection of "interludes" for various microtonal ensembles of strings, brass, and woodwinds, and a longform chamber work for string trio, organ, and tape. Davachi performs on organ throughout, joined by a remarkable cast of musicians from across the US and Europe: Whitney Johnson and Eyvind Kang on viola, Lucy Railton on cello, Diapason - the experimental microtonal brass ensemble from Los Angeles - the Swiss Renaissance flute consort Phaedrus, and Chamber Choir Ireland, conducted by Nils Schweckendiek, who deliver the French-sung Follies, the closing panel of the choral suite, written for six voices.
Rooted in the minimalist tradition from which Davachi has always operated, the music unfolds at the pace of breath - long tones rising from the pipes of centuries-old instruments, voices suspended in resonant space, microtonal intervals shimmering at the edge of perception. This is not easy listening, nor is it meant to be. When duration and the reduction of materials are at play, the ear and mind are forced to confront sound itself. The Will of Tongues is a celebration of iterative listening and intimate aural experience - of confrontation, patience, and the vast psychic horizons that open between the notes.
Issued by Late Music as a triple LP housed in a 7mm spine colour outer sleeve, with a 12-page booklet and poly-lined inner sleeves.