Few artists would want to be defined by their earliest attempts at original work, but in the case of Canadian minimalist Sarah Davachi, her sandbox phase is instructive. As a fan of the Romantic tone poet and pianist Frédéric Chopin, the young Davachi took his tear-jerking chord progressions and distilled them into her first compositions, with everything subordinated to these shifting tonal elements. Her motivations haven’t changed much since those early experiments in tone and texture, even if her methods have. Like Henri Matisse, whose paintings turn still life into inner life by prioritizing color above all other elements, Davachi drills down into a single instrument at a time, cracking open a vast spectrum of harmonic variation to reveal new expressive possibilities.
On Let Night Come on Bells End the Day, her fifth full-length release in six years, Davachi limits her palette to Mellotron and electric organ across five pieces which, like the best drone music, offer a fleeting glimpse of the infinite. Her albums derive their individual character from their respective sets of instruments, varying according to her systematic exploration of the range of available timbres. Vergers in 2016 was composed on the EMS Synthi 100, an analog synthesizer from the 1970s, while last year’s All My Circles Run was entirely acoustic, focusing on overdubbed strings, organ, piano, and voice. Davachi’s ability to leap from instrument to instrument, framing their individual temperaments while listening for unexpected affinities, isn’t a fluke; one of her first jobs was as a guide at Calgary’s National Music Centre, where she would arrive early to spend time learning a new instrument before conducting tours.
Throughout her many releases since 2013, Davachi, who studied electronic music at Mills College, in California, has tended to center herself in meditative, durational drones, drawing comparisons to the deep, dense planes of Éliane Radigue and Kevin Drumm. But once you’re absorbed into the hazy vistas of Let Night Come, ornate melodic whispers begin to peek through. On “Mordents,” she hints at a childhood spent straight-backed at the piano as a baroque melody wends its way towards encroaching chords, each note decaying into harmonic fog; tones mingle like drops of moisture in the air until all is enveloped.
Grander still, “Buhrstone” unfurls itself like a post-rock epic, each chord change building up to an urgent, breath-catching ecstasy; after seven minutes, the climax echoes the soaring heights of Sigur Rós or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Through the familiar wobble of the organ and the Mellotron—a 1960s keyboard that utilizes magnetic tape—Davachi also paints a subtle homage to classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes, and the Grateful Dead. The trail of organ reverb in the final seconds of “Mordents” even feels like an abstract approximation of a rock ‘n’ roll ending: a flourish at the end of a black angel’s death song.
The fifth and final piece, “Hours in the Evening,” is a sensory nerve-jamming of sustained, pearlescent tones that nods to her chief influence, the minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, whose practice had a transformative effect on Davachi as a music student. Like her forebears, Davachi has an innate understanding of drone music as a phenomenological, time-bending experience. The beauty of drone, after all, lies not in its duration but in its ephemerality: a single, conscious moment both collapsed and extended, disintegrating right before us. Let Night Come on Bells End the Day is loyal to that momentary perception of the sublime.
