Sean McCann
The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.
The world needs more Sarah Davachi. In these apocalyptic, endlessly stimulating times, it can be difficult to find slow and soothing (read: ambient) sounds that aren’t tied to a “Lo-Fi Beats To Study And Chill To” playlist, a corporate ad spot, or a cynical wellness campaign. (For a much more comprehensive and controversial takedown of the ambient-industrial complex, read Samuel McLemore’s Tone Glow review of Space Afrika’s Honest Labour.) This isn’t to say there’s not an abundance of good ambient music immediately available via a quick skim of the internet’s ether — only that for those relatively uninvested in the genre (myself included), it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In her solo organ work and beyond, Sarah Davachi makes this task much easier: Her music is at once steeped in centuries of church tradition and removed from what any other artist is doing in either the spiritual realm or the secular. She constructs her chords from droning tones — and overtones — sometimes held for minutes at a time, but she also makes incredible use of silence as a counterpoint to these minimalist/baroque, austere/lush sounds.
“En Bas Tu Vois,” which translates roughly from French as “Below You See,” finds the Calgary-born, Los Angeles-based experimentalist building sonic walls on a foundation of smooth static, creating 13 minutes of music that can calm your most existential anxieties — not simply because her sounds are oozing and softly textured, but because they’re harmonically and timbrally engaging enough to push those worries to a dark and disused corner of your brain, if only for a quarter hour.