Sarah Davachi's 'The Will of Tongues' Maps a Full-Scale Drone Work

The composer’s two-and-a-half-hour album for organ and ensemble, out on her Late Music imprint under Warp Records, examines friction between sustained tones and microtonal shifts.

Sarah Davachi’s new album The Will of Tongues, released on her Late Music imprint under Warp Records, stretches across 13 tracks and roughly two and a half hours. It is built primarily from pipe organ recordings made in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, with additional parts for voices, brass, woodwinds, and strings recorded by ensembles in New York, Switzerland, and Ireland. Davachi, a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA, assembles the material with a structure that leans academic without losing physical presence.

The album breaks into six discrete compositions. Three interludes separate string, brass, and woodwind timbres. The three-part “Song of the Smiles” moves through “Hours,” “Salts,” and “Follies