Late Vinyl & CDs

Review: The Head As Form'd In The Crier's Choir is Sarah Davachi's latest album, and her sixth or seventh for her very own Late Music. Inspired by the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, this new record is a vanishingly passionate septet of songs, a suite of mystifying reverence bound in the otherwise kept-simple arrangements of organs, strings, trombones, woodwinds, voices and electronics. A doomy liturgical feeling is instantly evoked here, with peacefully pure yet mournful drones sense-dashingly likened to the pealing of a bell, as though the sonorous resonances thus emitted had been stretched out in a worthy but failed attempt to stop time. A lengthy theoretical tract accompanies the release, minutely detailing the various specialist pipe organs used on the record, as well as their formal relevance to the record's theme as impurely meantoned instruments, as well as their historic, occult provenance.

Review: Sarah Davachi's latest record, The Head As Form'd In The Crier's Choir, is a septet of compositions, written between 2022 and 2024, that form a conceptual suite and album-length observation of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage. Transient in both name and sound, this stunning, droning set of compositions will work as timely quellers for those currently in a migratory state of mind, literally and/or figuratively. Often basking in the impure associations evoked by pure harmony and tonality, all the pieces are slow-moving, suggesting a lowered existential frame rate. Drawing inspiration from the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice - in which Orpheus ventures into Hades while living, dodging the usual psychopompic rites applied to those who have actually died, in a wager with the gods to resurrect Eurydice, his love - Davachi's record is a worthy intertext, bringing stygian drones of egress - woodwinds and electronic stretchings most notably - to the theme.