Sarah Davachi Extends Her Listening Practice on ‘The Will of Tongues’

Sarah Davachi’s new album arrives with a stated purpose: “to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening.” That premise is not empty framing. At 140 minutes, The Will of Tongues is built to slow the body down long enough for sound to become physical.

Davachi recorded on historic pipe organs across three nations, joined by a cast that includes The Sung Blood Players, Renaissance flute consort Phaedrus, brass ensemble Diapson, and Chamber Choir Ireland. The material draws on vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure. The technical language could fill a thesis, but here it serves a more basic function: giving the ear something to hold onto across a long duration.

The album follows Two Sisters as a logical extension of Davachi’s method. Where that record tightened her focus, The Will of Tongues expands it. The accompanying videos — “Song of the Smile’s Fig: III. Follies,” “Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds,” “Canto Solo” — work through suggestion rather than explanation. A foraging buck in a black-and-white forest, a rotating candle mechanism, cyanotype blues: the images mirror the music’s patience.

What Davachi is after is not novelty but a shift in attention. On repeated plays, the album moves from surface beauty to something closer to transport. The compositions pass through the body. That is the point of the exercise, and why the work matters as more than a technical achievement.