Sarah Davachi: A Refined Goth

The composer on her love for prog, early music and just intonation

Sarah Davachi’s drone pieces for pipe organ and analog synthesizers have captured attentive audiences for a decade.

Born in Calgary, Canada, the 37-year old composer-performer studied at Mills College in Oakland, California, and now resides in Los Angeles, where she’s currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA.

Her newest double album, The Head As Form’d In The Crier’s Choir, is an extension of the compositional ideas explored in her acclaimed works Antiphonals (2021) and Two Sisters (2022).

The new pieces were partly inspired by the Greek Orpheus myth, particularly Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus (1922), and Monteverdi’s early baroque opera l’Orfeo (1607). Remember that myth? It’s about this famous bard and singer who descends into the underworld to recover his lost wife, but instead loses her forever and gets ripped to shreds.

Prejudging from Davachi’s music and subject matter, I had imagined her as a quite somber and melancholic character, but in our one-hour-plus conversation, she came across joyful, funny and light-hearted. Still, I’ve rarely talked to an artist as serious about their craft.

Sarah Davachi

Do you have any specific memories of getting into music?

I am of the Walkman and Discman generation, so when I was 12 or 13, I just listened to music constantly in headphones. That influenced the way I approach my own music, because it allowed me to hear detail in the recording and production. I would sit there and listen to things over and over again, trying to hear details that I hadn't heard at the previous time, which is still a big component of my recorded music.

And you also received classical piano training, right?

Yeah, I started when I was six, quit when I was 15, started again at 17, and then quit again when I was in university. At first I did it because my parents wanted me to, but I didn't really care too much. When I went back to playing, it was out of a real interest in engaging with the music. But I never liked performing in that context. It always felt like there was a lot of pressure to do it right, and if you screw up, the whole thing is ruined.

I read that Bach was one of your early heroes.

It's funny, because you can't learn an instrument and not learn Bach at some point, especially for the piano you don't even get a choice of another composer. For a lot of people, it has this feeling of being a chore. But I remember practicing at my piano at home and enjoying breaking it down, playing things differently and noticing how the sound changes. Because it's polyphonic music, you're engaging different things while you're playing. I just remember latching onto that, for whatever reason.

Was there much classical music in your home?

Not at all. There was a lot of older pop music growing up, stuff from the 1940s and 1950s. My parents are Iranian, so there was a lot of Persian popular music as well.

What’s your relationship to Iranian culture? Did you ever travel there?

I grew up on Persian food, in a house full of Persian rugs. But I've never been to Iran and will never go. It’s complicated – by their legal definition, because my dad is Iranian, I’d be considered Iranian too. In order to go there legally, I would have to get an Iranian passport, and they don't recognize dual citizenship, so my Canadian citizenship wouldn't matter. I don't think they treat their citizens very well, so I will just avoid it for the rest of my life.

photo: Sean McCann

Can you remember when you first played a pipe organ?

When I was 20, I got a job at a musical instrument museum in Calgary. That was very formative for me. There were some smaller organs and a big, electrically blown reed organ that I used to play quite a lot. One of my colleagues at the time was part of an organ club. Most of them were organists and music directors, so we would meet every other Friday at somebody's church, play the organ and hang out. At the first of those nights, I was playing a large pipe organ in a concert hall, and it was wild, just the sounds that I was controlling and the space I was commanding. I remember that quite distinctly.

What did your job at the instrument museum entail?

I was a docent. At the time, the museum had a very low profile in the city. I would guide these tours every Sunday, and for weeks on end, nobody would come. I was still being paid to be there, but I wasn't having to do any of the actual work, so I would just spend time playing with the instruments. Being alone in a room full of keyboard instruments is a very unique experience.

Sounds like heaven for an introvert.

It was, yeah, absolutely. (laughs)

Were you into popular music at all growing up?

Yeah, I’d say I was a pretty normal teenager. I listened to pop music and went through different scenes and subcultures. I started my various goth phases. I would go to punk shows because I liked the music to some degree and my friends were into it, but it didn't feel like I belonged there. It took a while to figure out where I fit in. It wasn't until I went to Mills [College] and got immersed in the Bay Area experimental music scene that I figured that out.

I’d claim you're still in one of your “various goth phases”.

I would agree. (laughs) I still wear a lot of black. That indicates it a little bit. When I was in high school, it used to be crazy clothing and really heavy black makeup and stuff like that. So it's more refined these days.

You have been doing your NTS show Le Jardin for some years. There are a couple of constant musical strands in your selections – classical and experimental music, British prog, Krautrock/Kosmische, synth pop, goth and dreampop.

That’s just the music I've liked listening to for a lot of my life. It’s an amalgamation of the experiences I've had, of playing classical music as a teenager, and then finding different paths and interests within that, going down those roads. Those experiences of deep listening – which I want to call it in lack of a better term – on headphones at a formative age, when your brain is still developing, triggered an interest in the intimacy of listening and being able to hear detail and having appreciation for how you construct sound. Genre matters less to me. I find myself looking at music that does similar things, or that interests me in a similar way, regardless of whether it's from the 1980s or the 1780s.

The prog stuff is interesting, because many music snobs despise it.

Early on, I would hear this virtuosic, over-the-top music, and I was like, what is this shit? This is horrible. This is the complete antithesis of what I know myself to care about. There's still a lot of prog that falls into that category that I don't understand. Finding my way into prog came through an interest in the synthesizers they were using, or the keyboard instruments that featured prominently, like [Hammond] B-3s and Mellotrons. It allowed me to hear it differently, and find branches that clicked with me because of the detail and the layers of the sound. Then I was like, oh my god, this is the apex of popular music! I guess I don't even think of prog as popular music, because it's so weird. It feels quite fringy.

Well, it's quite unpopular these days.

Yeah. (laughs)

photo: Sean McCann

Who were some of the modern composers that influenced you when you started developing your own compositional practice?

La Monte Young’s music allowed me to see that you can do something with this interest in long tones and harmony, that you can make it into a musical experience. I also was listening to Terry Riley, probably even more at that time. Once I was at Mills, I discovered Éliane Radigue and James Tenney, who I think is, for whatever reason, really overlooked. His music is so amazing, and he also wrote a lot about music, in a very technical way. I see myself in the same kind of way as being interested in conceptualizing as much as doing it. And then of course all the others, Alvin Lucier, Alvin Curran, and so on.

How did you get interested in baroque and early music?

I had an early interest in Bach and baroque music through my piano and music history lessons but I just hadn't looked deeper into it yet. I remember getting a very surface level introduction to Gregorian chants. It was presented as music that informs classical music, music you need to learn so you can appreciate classical music. It wasn’t presented as music that has its own merit and value. That stuck with me for a long time.

At one point it just emerged that I love the way that medieval music or renaissance music sounds, so I looked into these musics more seriously. As I dove deeper into it, both musically and conceptually, there were interesting things in it that I saw recurring in contemporary experimental music, especially minimalist music. Once you go down that path, everything becomes more obvious: We started in one way, and then things got standardized in another way, and now it's kind of swung back, so we’re opening that up again and looking at these other ideas, which just happen to be the same ideas that people were interested in many hundreds of years ago.

One of the most obvious aspects being the interest in alternate tuning systems.

Yeah. It's funny because I when I first started university, I was majoring in mathematics. I was good at it in high school. It felt like playing Bach to me, like a puzzle to figure out. But in university I realized that I wasn't very good at actual, real maths. I was interested in the idea of it, but didn't want to actually do it. So I switched to philosophy and music. There was a course offered about music and mathematics, and it was about tuning systems, in particular just intonation. That opened up my understanding of early music too. There’s this story that since they discovered equal temperament in the 1700s, all music has been equal temperament – which is not true at all. It wasn't really standardized until the 20th century.

Just intonation has been a huge topic in the experimental music community for decades at this point. Still we are trained on equal temperament – so when we first encounter music in just intonation, it sounds strange or dissonant. An unlearning process is necessary to enjoy it fully.

Maybe it's a generalization, but people who find themselves working in experimental musical genres seem to be interested in things that are not normal, not standard – there's an innate interest in what is different. Especially this kind of music, you like it or you don't, there isn't much of a middle ground. I remember the first music in just intonation that I listened to was Shri Camel by Terry Riley. I didn’t understand it – it was more of an emotional response to that dissonance of sound that I didn't know how to explain at the time, but I found interesting.

In just intonation, there are certain intervals that are very noticeably dissonant and different from equal temperament, but something like an interval of a fifth, for instance, in just intonation versus equal temperament, there's only a tiny difference that most people won’t hear. So you can make music that has the same feeling of just intonation in equal temperament, just by using fifths and fourths and octaves, because an octave is an octave, and with fifths and fourths, the difference is not that perceptible. You can get that same feeling within the confines of equal temperament. Because you don’t always have access to instruments that you can retune. But I think I digressed from your question…

No it’s absolutely fine, but speaking of retuning instruments – your new album is a collection of compositions mostly for pipe organs and analog synthesizers, which you are playing yourself, and a handful of guest musicians. Which parameters inform these instrument choices?

It depends, it’s all based on what the piece seems to need. This record in particular was about paring it down to the instruments that speak to my practice in the best way. Over the years, I've used a lot of different electronic instruments, and I very much appreciate that each one does its own unique thing. Recently I've become interested in what's my bread and butter. It’s the electric organ – in a perfect world I’d have a [Hammond] B-3 at home, which I don’t, but I have a Korg CX-3, which is the only analog simulator of a B-3 and sounds indistinguishable from it. The Mellotron obviously is an important instrument as well. In terms of synthesizers, the ones that I used on this record were ones that have tuning capabilities. With pipe organs, I always take a Zoom recorder with me when I go on tour. My philosophy is to record and document everything I do with organs. It's always better to have it and not need it.

The pieces are long, many of them over ten minutes. There are no three minute edits for wellness playlists. Still, you're a full-time artist and you live off your music. Do you ever think about making it more accessible?

I am very aware that ten minute tracks are not the smartest path to go down if you want your music to be easily digestible and popular on Spotify. Since the pandemic, there's also been a lack of funding. Artists tend to be expected to do the same work, but for less money. I feel that pressure and anxiety. So of course I do care about this stuff. I want my records to sell. I want to be booked for shows. But at the end of the day, it's still important to me to make the kind of music that I want. I can't understand how I would feel good making music that's not what I want to make, just for commercial reasons. That would be horrible, like a nightmare. But for me it feels stable enough right now, so we'll see how long that keeps going.

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Media Diet

Listening: still on my Soshi Takeda binge

Reading: Chilly Gonzales – Why I Regret Giving Birth To The Neoclassical Genre (The Quietus, 2024)

“Back in 2004 my music business contacts saw my Solo Piano transformation as career suicide. Nobody thought of solitary piano music as a potential gravy train. But here we are, the algorithm has spoken and background music is now big business.”

Interesting piece from Chilly Gonzales, who is often credited with pioneering the neoclassical genre but has a new ‘rap’ album out now. This is a polemic rant against that weird strain of the music industry centering around lean-back streaming playlists and inoffensive arpeggio-core that he might have accidentally birthed.

Watching: Sir John Eliot Gardiner – Bach: A Passionate Life (BBC, 2013)

This documentary is not great because Rick Beato recommends it, but because it taught me so much I didn’t know about Bach’s life and music, even though like Sarah Davachi I’ve loved his music ever since I first encountered it as a child. Narrated by the conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, this BBC production is shot on locations in Eisenach and Leipzig and contains loads of amazing music by the greatest composer to ever walk this earth.