Canadian composer Sarah Davachi is our next guest on The Music Folder. Davachi’s work blends electroacoustic minimalism, drone, ambient, and modern classical. A multi-instrumentalist herself, she’s toured internationally and collaborated with artists like Grouper, William Basinski, and Suzanne Ciani. In 2020, she launched her own label, Late Music. Her decade-long role at Canada’s National Music Centre - curating and interpreting its collection of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments - sparked a deep interest in critical organology, which she pursued through a PhD at UCLA.

In this episode of The Music Folder, Sarah Davachi talks with music critic and curator Michele Palozzo about her early fascination with the emotional depth of single harmonic moments in Chopin’s music, which led her to explore drone and minimalism as a way of stretching time and sound. She discusses her interest in texture, timbre, and the physicality of instruments - acoustic and electronic alike - rejecting the binary between them. Davachi emphasizes a visual and atmospheric sensibility in her work, drawing connections to cinema, minimalist art, and archival materials. She also speaks about her album Antiphonals, shaped in part by pandemic solitude, and how live performance has renewed her focus on duration and altered temporal perception.

Interview by Michele Palozzo, Milan 11/10/2021. 

The Music Folder is a talk-series, curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts.