Sarah Davachi's 'The Will of Tongues' Is a Cathedral You Can Actually Live In
The Sonic Breakdown
The Will of Tongues was recorded on historical pipe organs across the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands, and Davachi surrounds herself with a small pantheon of collaborators: violists Whitney Johnson and Eyvind Kang, cellist Lucy Railton, the Diapason brass ensemble (Nev Wendell, Nicholas Ginsburg, Mattie Barbier, Mason Moy), the Phaedrus Renaissance flute consort (Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, Luis Martinez Pueyo), and Chamber Choir Ireland conducted by Nils Schweckendiek. The string-trio/organ/tape piece and the choral work were commissioned by EMPAC in Troy, New York, and Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland, respectively.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Organ pipes doing what organ pipes have always done — moving the floor a little before you notice it.
The Spatial Dynamics: Auden Alsop, writing at The Quietus, singles out “Songs of the Smile’s Fig” — Davachi’s setting of André Breton’s 1926 surrealist poem “The Spectral Attitudes” — for how its “open chord voicings and foregrounded soprano register, enhanced by church acoustic recording” achieve an “ecstatic feeling.” That word — ecstatic — keeps coming back on repeat listens.
Standout Performance
Chamber Choir Ireland, on the pieces they appear on, do the thing choirs are actually for: they make the room sing back.
Why It’s Certified
- 🌈 “Songs of the Smile’s Fig” — the record’s brightest window.
- ⚡ Davachi’s own framing, quoted by Alsop, that the record’s purpose is “to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening.” True in both directions: the players’ and ours.
- 🌈 Two-plus hours that never once feel like padding.