The first release on the experimental artist’s new label Late Music
By Evan Minsker
Sarah Davachi has announce a new album called Cantus, Descant. It’s out September 18 via her new label Late Music (which is set up through Warp’s partner label division). Two songs feature her vocals on a record for the first time. Below, hear the new track “Stations II.”
Davachi discussed the new album in a statement:
It’s been a busy year already for Sarah Davachi, who has put out multiple releases including the Five Cadences EP. A new book called Papers is also on the way.I spent a lot of time while working on this album thinking about impermanence and endings, which led me to change my understanding of “vanitas” and “memento mori.” These concepts arise allegorically across classical antiquity and Buddhist thought, among many other sources, but they were most obsessively expressed during the Renaissance in still lives and miniatures that contrasted the simultaneous passing and stillness of time. My interpretation is completely secular, softer, and more benign, but the awareness of a moment’s feeling remains. There’s a lot of symbolist imagery in the work titles, references to place and nature; the “Stations” series in particular is a reconfiguring of the idea of states of being. The pervading affect on the album is one that gives reverence to the suspension, the epoché, a space where we welcome and attempt to reconcile impermanence. It is an opportunity to go inside—oneself, one’s sound—in order to simultaneously commune with our comforts and that which we mourn, perhaps not unlike the function of a hymn.
Cantus, Descant:
01 Stations II
02 The Pelican
03 Ruminant
04 Still Lives
05 Stations V
06 Midlands
07 Play the Ghost
08 Stations IV
09 Passing the Bell
10 Hanging Gardens
11 Stations I
12 Gold Upon White
13 Oldgrowth
14 Stations III
15 Canyon Walls
16 Badlands
17 Diaphonia Basilica
