The pipe organs that lie – often unplayed and ignored – across tens of thousands of churches were, for centuries, the most complex devices on earth. These pieces of gothic plumbing were truly the first synthesisers, mixing sine waves from reed pipes and flue pipes – all manipulated mathematically by stops, sliders and swell pedals – in exactly the same way that contemporary electronic keyboards use “additive synthesis” to create composite voicings.
Sarah Davachi is a Canadian composer whose drone-based pieces explore timbre and harmonics, particularly in synthesisers, and she has long been fascinated by the endlessly adaptable synthetic qualities of pipe organs. The first LP on her new Warp Records imprint Late Music sees her exploiting the distinctive sonic peculiarities of five church organs in Amsterdam, Chicago, Vancouver, Copenhagen and Los Angeles. As with most of Davachi’s work, there is not much in the way of harmonic complexity – the sudden change from major to minor, 1 minute and 40 seconds in to a slow-burning etude called The Pelican is about as thrilling as she gets on that front.
Her interests lie in texture rather than technique. Church organs are usually known for their bowel-quaking volume and bombast, but Davachi prefers to explore each instrument’s more intimate, breathy qualities, and the way in which each resonates in its space. On Still Lives and Hanging Gardens, she uses a tape echo to create icy effects; on the hymnal Gold Upon White, dark organ drones resonate pleasingly with the overdubbed piccolo voicings of a Mellotron; on the extraordinary Ruminant, an overdubbed violin throbs at almost the same frequencies as the flue pipes. Two tracks also see Davachi try her hand as an introspective singer-songwriter, her shivery, FX-laden voice melting into the organ drones. Cantus, Descant is an album that functions as meditative background music, but turn it up and it becomes an unignorable study in sound.
• Cantus, Descant is released on 18 September on Late Music.
Also out this month
Pianist Anthony Romaniuk is best known for his interpretations of early music, but his new album Bells (Alpha Classics) is an intriguingly broad range of material – from William Byrd to Ligeti to Chick Corea – played on a range of keyboards. A 12th-century hymn and a Bach prelude sound joyfully disorientating played on a Fender Rhodes; a Shostakovich fugue gets a Bill Evans-ish overture; while a florid African kora solo is elegantly transcribed for harpsichord. The Kazakh violinist Galya Bisengalieva’s debut solo album Aralkum (for One Little Indian Records, the home of both Crass and Björk over the years) is a meditation on environmental disaster that – ironically – only really starts to be fun when she delves deep into dystopian territory. By track four, when detuned strings growl and saw against glitchy systems noise while her violin dances around the upper end of the register, it all sounds absolutely thrilling.
