Drone

Listening Through the Body in the Music of Sarah Davachi

| Tyran Grillo

In the music of Sarah Davachi, sound remains suspended beyond the moment of its apparent exhaustion, gathering strange internal populations as its harmonics fracture and quietly reassemble. What initially presents itself as stasis develops a secret grammar of departures, an entire cosmology folded into the infinitesimal distance between two frequencies. The ear, accustomed to locating movement in the passage from one event to another, must relearn the contours of an event whose distances are buried within it. A barely perceptible alteration in pitch opens a wound across the whole duration, exposing the fragile membranes through which consciousness negotiates its relationship with the audible. Each resonance becomes an archaeology of its own disappearance, a spectral excavation of possibilities held captive within the seemingly immovable. One begins to suspect that time possesses no reliable exterior, that every second harbors its own miniature antiquity, and that listening is the delicate violence by which we break into it. Davachi’s compositions inhabit this ontological fissure with extraordinary patience, allowing sound to become estranged from its origins until even the familiar reveals the exquisite foreignness of its existence.

Such music emerges from an imagination profoundly attuned to the afterlives of instruments, particularly their capacity to preserve obsolete understandings of what it means for the world to vibrate. Davachi’s pipe organs carry the accumulated breath of structures designed to give eternity a physical address, while her electronic instruments disclose a more intimate archaeology of voltage and decay. Her engagement with temporarlity subjects the very possibility of consonance to philosophical scrutiny, exposing harmony as a provisional agreement between matter and the cultural imagination. A chord can preserve the memory of an entire system of listening through which earlier ears organized the permissible universe; a single overtone can dismantle that universe without ever raising its voice. Here the Renaissance continues to dream through the nervous system of modernity, and the boundary between the sacred and the mechanical dissolves into a deeper uncertainty about where human intention ends and the secret autobiography of matter begins. Every perception arrives fractionally late to its own happening, already carrying the faint sediment of something irretrievable. Such belatedness gives Davachi’s work its peculiar tenderness, as she asks the ear to become answerable to events that cannot quite be claimed as present.

Recorded in Los Angeles throughout 2020 and released the following year on her Late Music imprint, Antiphonals retreats from the monumental expanses of Cantus, Descant into a more intimate architecture of resonance and remembrance. Entirely composed, performed and produced by Davachi, its eight compositions draw upon the spectral vocabulary of the Mellotron, whose simulated instrumental voices mingle with electric and pipe organs, harpsichord, piano and synthesizer. These instruments seem to speak through one another’s mouths, each timbre trailing an afterimage that cannot be returned to its source. The title evokes the ancient liturgical practice of alternating voices, yet these exchanges unfold within a solitary consciousness, each utterance answering another across the immeasurable distance between sound and its recollection. One hears the same mind assuming the roles of supplicant and sanctuary, of an unseen singer whose throat has been replaced by corridors. The album’s silences acquire the thickness of walls that have absorbed centuries of prayers without ever understanding a word.

The opening “Chorus Scene” puts a rusted harpsichord on the edge of mutability in the night, its brittle articulations attended by electronic tones that soften the undercurrent with their song. The instrument seems to be reading a letter from the future in an alphabet made entirely of hinges. From this uncertain threshold, “Magdalena” touches us with the organ-shaped song of a thought that finds our secrets, working itself into an iron filament pulled through the marrow. As synthesized wonders reveal their light amid the darkness, we are taken into an inner sanctum that cannot be located on any map of the body. The melodies never quite consent to being possessed. They pass through attention in the very act of teaching attention how to receive them, leaving the heart momentarily stained by colors for which vision has devised no name. A more secular beauty enters by way of “Gradual of Image,” whose folkish accessibility makes room for the wandering soul that might reach out for a melody and discover an entire history of touch concealed inside it.

Yet this tenderness has a shadow. In the distorted reaches of “Border of Mind,” the music brings us face to face with our wounded selves, while “Rushes Recede” offers the uncanny sensation of a stained-glass heart cradling hymnody in its blood-bearing chambers. These interiors are neither wholly consoling nor wholly threatening; their beauty consists in refusing to conceal what the light discovers. Elsewhere, the drones of “First Cadence” and “Doubled Flutes” pour illumination at dream speed, stretching the interval between recognition and understanding until the two appear to have been born in different centuries. Even the withheld motion implicit in “Abeyant” suggests a harmony engaged in the delicate work of self-awareness. Underlying this hushed communion is the suspicion that the ear can encounter its deepest interior only by listening to something it cannot identify as its own.

That suspicion undergoes a more concentrated trial in Basse Brevis, co-commissioned by Radio France and INA GRM and premiered at the 2024 Présences festival dedicated to Steve Reich. In this eighteen-minute enmeshment of organ and synthesized voices, Davachi extends her minimalist investigations into the intricate relationships between timbre and duration, letting the gradual evolution of sonic material become an exercise in perceptual displacement. The distinction between instrument and artifact grows porous, gradually erasing the fingerprints of its own manufacture. Between instrumental resonance and musique concrète, abstraction acquires an unexpected tenderness; each tone feels at once exposed and inaccessible, a piece of matter dreaming that it possesses an inward life. The listener is asked to inhabit a structure whose dimensions change only when one stops measuring them, an acoustic building secretly rearranging its egresses around the person standing inside.

Something resembling an uncovering of sin touches the sky with its highest flames. The music conflagrates into the ashen skeletons of our most untoward thoughts, and for a moment we wish to crush them into powder and throw them into the nearest river. Davachi instead refashions these remains into a subtle yet crucial monument to the life we used to live and from which we now deviate in search of something pure and good. The gesture is troubling precisely because the monument refuses to entertain absolution. It preserves our former selves without granting them the privilege of innocence, allowing the listener to experience memory as a material still undergoing its own composition. Formal exploration and emotional immediacy occupy the same perceptual space; one feels the mind approach its deepest disfigurements by way of almost imperceptible changes in resonance. And while the piece seems to end where it started, a global circulation of thought has occurred, slingshotting consciousness backward in order to move on.

The scale of this investigation expands dramatically in The Will of Tongues, which stretches beyond two hours across three LPs. Thirteen compositions probe the boundaries of harmonic perception, gathering five solo works for historical pipe organs recorded across North America and the Netherlands alongside choral writing and microtonal instrumental encounters. An extended chamber work intertwines a string trio with organ and tape, deepening the inquiry. Musicians including Whitney Johnson and Eyvind Kang enter this field of resonances, with Lucy Railton and ensembles such as Chamber Choir Ireland contributing to its intricate human circuitry. Davachi’s enduring interest in tuning theory assumes an almost biological dimension: musical ideas migrate between instrumental bodies, undergoing tiny mutations until their identities can no longer be secured by the material that first carried them.

The first of its dispersed “Interludes” begins with strings whose metallic dissonances hover over fragile harmonies, opening a texture so encompassing that the very distinction between surface and depth seems briefly suspended. Farther along, an answering woodwind meditation restores a more harmonious balance to this cosmos, though its equilibrium never loses the memory of disturbance. When the brass eventually take their turn, their collective breath suggests one larger organism laboring to pronounce a consensus vowel. The movement among these instrumental families produces an antiphony on a scale more bodily than architectural, carrying forward the private exchanges of Antiphonals into a community of resonant flesh. The choral “Songs of the Smile’s Fig” introduce another series of arches, enchantments born of everyday interactions and the small interruptions that arrest us at the fragile edge of life. Their organ ancestry can be heard passing through the human throat, where resonance becomes newly vulnerable to the possibility of breaking. What holds a mirror to the soul here is also capable of cracking it. A voice does not merely occupy a note; it must risk an entire body to keep that note alive.

At the center stands the massive two-part “The Rose Dialogues,” meshing strings and drone with an eye turned on the imperfections of the flesh. Its title opens a botanical wound: thorn enters blood, and the rose begins to resemble an argument between what can be touched and what can only be imagined through touch. The senses negotiate this profound disconnect between the physical body and the metaphysical world by giving us a taste of what lies just beyond their own grasp. The music maintains a delicate interval between corporeal resistance and spiritual appetite, allowing each to reveal the other’s unfinished dimensions. Around this central wound, the organ works pursue their own forms of divided speech. “Canto Solo” and “Canto Duo” undulate at the pace of a tidal shift, in which even one tone can contain the outline of an interlocutor, and even dialogue can disclose the intolerable loneliness of being heard.

Other correspondences develop across the album’s expanse. Separated by the intervening music, “The First Tuning” and “The Second Tuning” appear as windows turned toward each other from different buildings, each illuminating a bright expanse in which the blood drops of the human condition become impossible to ignore. To tune is to admit that there exists a difference between where we are and where we mean to arrive, however minute or unreachable that distance may be. Buried among these proliferating relationships, “Four Narrow Forms” pulls the organ’s breath until it seems to have nothing left to say. Yet this extremity is also strangely generous. The instrument’s apparent depletion exposes the physical effort sustaining what we too readily call eternity, reminding us that even an apparently disembodied resonance depends upon mechanisms that can fail. From this recognition emerges an acoustical codex of hesitation. Listening must remain vulnerable to phenomena too gradual to possess.

Across these works, Davachi stages an encounter between the mortal body and the impossible duration it has invented instruments to imagine. Perhaps the deepest provocation resides in the suggestion that our ears are themselves historical instruments, tuned by choices made before we ever drew breath. Consonance, in this sense, becomes an inherited belief whose laws can be revised by the slightest disobedient overtone. There is tenderness in that possibility, though it carries an ethical question disguised as an acoustic one: Whose future listening are we helping to make possible?

Kali Malone: Living Torch

| Tyran Grillo

To sustain a flame is to enter into a secret negotiation with extinction, to nourish an illumination whose very existence depends upon its gradual disappearance. In Living Torch, Kali Malone transforms this paradox into an almost unbearable metaphysics of resonance, wherein sound becomes both the vessel and the slow dissolution of its own materiality. Duration wavers between breath and electricity, harmonic inevitability and spectral disobedience. Each sustained tone carries the sediment of another, opening subterranean chambers where the ear must renegotiate its relationship to time. The austere architectures that have distinguished Malone’s compositional language, particularly her excavations of the pipe organ’s interior life, undergo a profound transfiguration. Something once seemingly immovable begins to tremble at the edges of its formal certainty, exposing a vulnerability concealed beneath the mathematics of repetition. Perhaps a structure reveals its deepest truth precisely when it can no longer guarantee its foundations.

Composed between 2020 and 2021 at the Parisian studios of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, that storied laboratory of electroacoustic experimentation, Living Torch extends Malone’s investigation of just intonation and canonic structures into a labyrinth of timbral interdependencies. The trombone of Mats Äleklint and bass clarinet of Isak Hedtjärn merge with Malone’s electronic apparatus, including the boîte à bourdons and an ARP 2500 synthesizer bearing the historical imprint of Éliane Radigue. Commissioned for GRM’s Acousmonium loudspeaker orchestra and premiered in its complete multichannel incarnation at Radio France, the piece treats space as an active participant in the reallocation of acoustic identity. The devotional patience of early music encounters the temporal dislocations of American minimalism, their intertwined genealogies refracted through the material consciousness of musique concrète. Within the sounding body, counterpoint undergoes a molecular reimagining. What survives of the canon is the eerie persistence of one vibration inside another, an inheritance speaking long after its source becomes unrecognizable.

In the first of the work’s two parts, the drone establishes itself as a compass of the heart, spinning in slow motion without ever securing a magnetic north. Its apparent stability is beset by minute discrepancies of pitch, the delicate interference of neighboring frequencies producing pulses that seem to originate beneath the audible surface. Just intonation, far from presenting a frictionless ideal of consonance, exposes the intimate volatility of consonance itself. One tone approaches another and the air thickens with consequences, while an apparently singular presence separates into competing interiors. Äleklint’s trombone contributes a corporeal grain that the electronics can prolong but never entirely domesticate. Hedtjärn’s bass clarinet emerges with a darker, more secretive pressure, its breath inhabiting the lowest registers with a kind of reluctant articulation. Their sonorities fuse with the circuitry, until the roughness of an attack or the instability of an exhalation discloses the laboring organism within. The human respiratory impulse is absorbed into an electrical continuum that nevertheless remains haunted by the possibility of suffocation.

The feeling of this music is intensely circular, caught in a bewildering simultaneity of waking and falling asleep. The internal drone wanders in search of a new body, only to discover the contours of the one it was desperate to leave, returning to the sadnesses that prompted its excursion. Malone’s long tones refuse the consolations of a conventional crescendo. Their concentration arises through microscopic redistributions of anxiety, through harmonic overtones that slip into audibility and retreat. Because the ear cannot settle upon a definitive foreground, listening assumes the uneasy condition of remembering something that has yet to become real. It is the opposite of déjà vu and is where the piece’s canonic intelligence becomes emotionally devastating. The music becomes an apparatus of selfhood, reforming its contours to prevent the body from disappearing while exhausting the impulse that keeps it alive.

By the second part, this inward circuitry has acquired a more troubled permeability. A sensation of distance enters the sound, suggesting wings gathering an impossible momentum. The instrumental voices seem to strain toward the edges of their registers, rubbing against the drones until the distinction between a breath drawn and a current sustained becomes increasingly tenuous. Low frequencies retain their gravitational authority, but their mass is traversed by finer disturbances, spectral fissures through which an unfamiliar dimension of the composition appears to glance. There is an undercurrent of despair in these migrations, although the music never permits despair the luxury of a settled identity. Each departure produces another return, subtly altering the place to which it leads. The two parts consequently establish a peculiar dramaturgy of circular motion, in which repetition does not close a circuit so much as deepen the wound around which the circuit has been drawn.

At moments, the atmosphere and trembling recall Darrin Verhagen’s Witch trilogy, whose sonic immersions can feel indistinguishable from visitations to the psyche’s hidden territories. Malone, however, moves according to the flickering logic of her own distinct flame. Where terror might be summoned by the arrival of an alien presence, Living Torch locates its deepest unease in the possibility that the foreign has always resided within the familiar. Its resonances move across the threshold where language ceases its habitual tug and asks the body to relearn the grammar of flight. Breath becomes an increasingly abstract measure of being, until the stillness of death seems momentarily audible inside the effort required to remain alive. The music’s spiritual force resides in this refusal to separate transcendence from its physiological cost.

What remains most unsettling is the ethical question concealed inside this choreography of persistence. A flame survives by consuming its own substance; a tone endures only through the continual expenditure of energy. Perhaps the self, too, is sustained through an unacknowledged succession of disappearances, each present tense quietly burning the person who made it possible. Between frequencies, identity ceases to be a possession and becomes a debt toward all the selves we have already extinguished. The torch illuminates no destination. It passes, instead, from one vanishing custodian to another, and the most difficult act of listening may be to recognize, among its vibrations, the unburied voices of those we had to become in order to survive ourselves.

Rafael Anton Irisarri: Points of Inaccessibility

| Tyran Grillo

The distance between two points is ordinarily a problem for geometry. On Points of Inaccessibility, it becomes a pathology of attention. A chance encounter at MUTEK in Mexico City in 2024 brought Ibero-American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri into conversation with Dutch media artist Jaco Schilp, whose invitation to the Uncloud residency in Utrecht the following spring led their inquiry into the abandoned carcass of the Pieter Baan Centre. Once a forensic psychiatric prison, the building had specialized in extracting intelligibility from captivity; now its emptied rooms hosted a different form of interrogation. Irisarri stretched bowed-guitar notes through looping circuitry until each gesture acquired the dimensions of a corridor without an exit, while Schilp’s custom point-cloud software translated the live sound into visual constellations perpetually failing to hold their shape. Here, the apparatus designed to render experience legible produced its own exquisite illegibility, a digital Rorschach in which perception caught itself manufacturing evidence. The building’s carceral history seeped into the circuitry, lending each disintegrating image the afterlife of something forcibly remembered.

Returning to New York, Irisarri approached those improvisations as ruins still inhabited by their makers. He mapped fragments into MIDI, insinuated Prophet 5 harmonies and Moog undertows beneath the bowed strings, then enlisted Abul Mogard’s editorial ear to preserve the encounter’s original volatility. The album’s title borrows from remote coordinates whose identities are determined by distance, but turns the cartographic conceit against our supposed culture of perpetual contact. Every algorithm promises a shortcut to intimacy while manufacturing fresh interiors of estrangement; every simulated acknowledgment arrives carrying the faint bureaucratic odor of an absence already processed and filed. Irisarri calls these compensatory rites “digital shamanism,” although their sorcery belongs to capitalist realism, which has taught alienation to impersonate its own cure. Across four movements, Points of Inaccessibility listens for the human pulse inside that recursive deception, excavating a hauntology of suspended futures from the detritus of technological communion. Memory persists as interference in a system increasingly incapable of remembering what its connections were meant to connect. Presence becomes the vanishing point of its own transmission, leaving consciousness to wander the immaculate circumference of an intimacy whose center has been quietly outsourced.

“Faded Ghosts of Clouds” is the voice of an unborn generation emanating from a realm that, despite being right beneath our feet, is all too easily ignored in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. The painful irony is that, while technology blinds us to the details of existence that make it so beautiful, it remains the apparatus by which such music becomes possible, gathering otherwise estranged elements into an orbit so internal that we have forgotten how to make physical contact with it. Drones of electronics and string-borne songs creep toward the edges of our collective waking dream. Across their slow ebb and flow, we are implicated as mere driftwood in the cosmic tide, reaching our arms out in slow motion toward the shore but coming up with only sand slipping through our trembling fingers. And while the textures mount and the notes appear to go skyward, our bodies sink in proportion, never knowing what light might await above the surface. There is something embryological about this inversion of gravity, as though the music were gestating an entire civilization within the amniotic darkness of its own forgotten origins. Each swelling frequency brings us closer to an inheritance we cannot claim without first acknowledging how much of ourselves we have surrendered to the machinery of recognition.

“Breaking the Unison” emerges as a child thereof, possessed of its own rebellious streak and a grittier electric guitar sound that magnifies its voice beyond fleshly containment. The more it cries out to be heard, the less defined it becomes, drowning in a sea of its own making as the world swarms inward over and over, until the face ceases to function as an individual marker and identity becomes one final exhale of illusory fixity. Yet there is a strange tenderness in this erosion, a willingness to inhabit the wound of differentiation before language cauterizes it with a name. Irisarri allows distortion to assume the dimensions of an unfinished autobiography, its pages written in the granular debris of sensations that never achieved the dignity of recollection. What remains is a kind of prenatal dissent, the terrible freedom of a consciousness discovering that the boundaries protecting its singularity might also be responsible for its loneliness.

With parent and child brought under the same galactic umbrella, their home is constituted by “Signals from a Distant Afterglow.” The title is prophetic, speaking in a language of arcs and pulses that, ordinarily too minute to be held and regarded, suddenly become knowable in human terms. The music extends its feelers into the interstices of perception, where every vibration seems to contain a small archaeology of the future. Then something miraculous happens, as vocal loops provided by Karen Vogt permit the possibility that something familiar may yet be found in the great unknown. Although wordless, her presence speaks volumes about the soul and its tender cage, suggesting that even the most intimate utterance must pass through a labyrinth of estrangement before reaching another consciousness. Her voice acquires the fragility of an artifact excavated from a future extinction, bearing the fingerprints of someone whose existence has yet to occur. The resulting intimacy is almost unbearable because its object remains suspended just beyond our capacity to identify it. We recognize the yearning before we can remember whom we have been yearning for.

The bars of that tender cage are comprised of “Memory Strands,” whose enveloping textures seem to originate in a place that has already held us in its hands from conception. As tender as it is clear in its delineation of heart from mind, the piece provides just enough order to arrest our fear of falling over the cliff of uncertainty. A portal within a portal, it opens a pathway into itself, ad infinitum, serenading us through its recursive slipstream. There are echoes here of Stephen Scott’s bowed piano works enmeshed with William Basinski’s loops and filtered through Tim Hecker’s incandescent abrasions, although such coordinates offer only provisional access to an interior that continually redraws its own perimeter. So much depth resides in these pieces, so many corners in which we might cower in awe at the immensity of this reality in which we find ourselves. Their beauty emerges from the possibility that memory, in preserving our intimacy with what has vanished, also perpetuates the original violence of its disappearance.

Perhaps this is where Points of Inaccessibility makes its most unsettling proposition. The Pieter Baan Centre was once dedicated to determining the contents of human interiority, converting the bewildering opacity of another person into something admissible as knowledge. Its former inhabitants were subjected to an institutional faith in the legibility of the soul. Irisarri returns us to that predicament through the spectral machinery of a world increasingly devoted to making every consciousness available for inspection. Yet the music carries within its fractures a quietly radical possibility: that our deepest obligation to one another might involve protecting what cannot be accessed. What if the ultimate intimacy were the recognition of another’s right to remain unknowable, even to those who love them? The geography of isolation would then disclose an unsuspected ethics of hospitality, one in which distance becomes a form of tenderness and the uncharted core acquires the sanctity of a home. At the remotest coordinate of this extraordinary album, we discover that the first act of love is to leave something in another person forever undiscovered, so that even the universe, with all its instruments of detection, must learn the humility of approaching a closed door without turning the handle.