Back in the saddle again, we need a Thing of The Day while we pick up the whatever we need to pick up again and well, this will more than do: we have something rather beautiful from Sarah Davachi:

“Prolific composer Sarah Davachi shares new single Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds Taken from new album The Will Of Tongues, out 28th August on Late Music. Davachi is the recipient of the 2026 Silver Lion award at the Venice Biennale”, not that we care about art prizes, art isn’t about prizes, this is piece of music is prize enough, Sarah Davachi’s art always demands time and…  

The press release:

“Today, Sarah Davachi shares Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds, the second single from her forthcoming album The Will of Tongues. It comes accompanied with a film made by long term friend and collaborator Dicky Bahto, who has worked with the likes of Julia Holter, Grouper, Chuck Johnson, Nite Jewel, and Tashi Wada. One of three interludes that appear on the new album, these works are part of an iterative and ongoing collection of pieces based on a cycle that Davachi conceptualizes as the ‘unison canon’, developed during a residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, USA through 2024 and 2025. Each ‘interlude’ corresponds to a particular system of just intonation alongside a specific sequence of pitches, and each may be articulated in one of three different ways: in either unison, harmonic, or polyphonic relation.

On this recording of ‘Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds’, the woodwinds were performed by Phaedrus, a Renaissance traverso consort. Phaedrus performs on a set of three tenor flutes and one bass flute, all tuned in A=405 Hz. They were each built of boxwood in 2025 by Giovanni Tardino in Basel, Switzerland, and are copied after a set of sixteenth-century flutes stored in the Accademia Filarmonica in Verona, Italy.

In the ‘interludes’, overall pacing and duration are left to the discretion of the ensemble. Such openness is a very important aspect of Davachi’s compositional process insofar as it allows the piece to form with meaningful differences in each instance, while also forcing players to actively listen and to play together with intention; to respond in real time as the sound manifests in acoustic space.

The Will of Tongues engages the numerous compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade especially – including iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure, all rooted in the minimalist tradition from which she operates – but with a more pointed and intentional touch than in previous forms. Across its thirteen tracks, ideas hocket from one ensemble or instrument to the next, slowly shifting in balance over the course of what is unmistakably a demanding length.

As a combined body of work, however, the music on this album seeks to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening, and for the awareness that such listening can serve as a kind of imaginative negative space; one that critically promotes confrontation and creation rather than escape. This collection of music is not easy listening, and it’s not meant to be – when long durations and a reduction of materials are at play, the ear and the mind are forced to truly face the reality of sound itself and the significant mental spaces that it continually gives rise to, which can carry deep wells of meaning if the listener is willing to journey there. The Will of Tongues is thus a celebration of iterative listening and of extreme engagement, of intimate aural experience and its vast psychic horizons”.

More later…

www.sarahdavachi.com / Previously on these pages