Five questions to Sarah Davachi

Interviews 28.03.2022

An original personality in the world of creation, Canadian composer and performer Sarah Davachi likes to combine electronic and instrumental sources. Sometimes defined as a "drone artist" (continuous flow with slow evolution), she evolves in a stylistic current that could be situated between Éliane Radigue and Terry Riley and traces her path in the current landscape of electroacoustic music.

You like to mix instruments and modular synthesizers; what kind of machines do you like to work with and why?
To be honest, I don't work much with modular synthesizers anymore and haven't for several years now. I've turned much more to acoustic instruments in the last five years, especially those that are capable of a sustained sound like organs and strings, and I also combine these sounds with electronic instruments like electric organs and the Mellotron. I also use synthesizers, but generally the only ones I use these days are wired instruments rather than modular ones such as the EMS Synthi AKS and Sequential Circuits Pro One. I prefer the limitations of wired synthesizers, they seem more like "instruments" to me, and sometimes I find the open format of modular synthesizers a bit awkward for my purposes. When I use modular synthesizers, it is also in a very limited way: I only use a series of oscillators and filters, all controlled from a mixing module. I really like the simplicity of sound that comes out of this process, focusing on the complex harmonic experience of the interacting sounds. I've always been very attracted to oscillators that have a high degree of spectral flexibility, such as those designed by Buchla & Associates, where it's just a single sweep potentiometer between frequencies and waveforms. It allows the same amount of control and specificity while keeping the door open to the variations inherent in these types of early analogue instruments. I like the instabilities of older instruments, which are not usually present on more modern instruments, even modern analog instruments. That's where a lot of the magic of the sound happens for me. But it's a very personal process for everyone and these are just my preferences and not a desire to say whether one of these instruments is better or worse than the others. Wired instruments still give me the same sense of exploration and flexibility, but they are more manageable for my compositional process and needs.

You often refer to Eliane Radigue when you talk about your music; do you feel close to her aesthetic; is she a model for you?
Eliane Radigue has been a huge influence on my career. I first discovered her work when I was doing my MA at Mills College, around 2010, initially because of her association with the institution. I had begun to explore compositional work with extended tones and was very interested in the possibilities of electronic music and electronic sound, particularly modular synthesizers at that time, but I didn't have many reference points for what might be realistically possible. Along with La Monte Young and Alvin Curran, Éliane's work offered me a way forward to gather my own compositional ideas about continuous sound and gradual change. I have always been fascinated by the idea of limits within instruments, but also within a composition, restricting my resources to a single instrumental source and deepening its sound. Éliane's exclusive focus on the ARP 2500 was very inspiring to me at the time. I also found parallels in my interest in and increasing use of acoustic instruments since about 2015 - I still work with electronic instruments but I tend to approach acoustic and electronic instruments in a similar way, an aesthetic orientation I also feel imprinted in Éliane's music. 

You play older instruments such as the Mellotron and theOrchestron; can you describe these instruments and tell us what attracts you to them?
I use the Mellotron a lot in my work. I've been attracted to that sound for quite a long time, maybe because of the quality of the texture. The Mellotron is an early form of sampler, quite popular in the 1960s and 1970s before digital sampling took over. Each key on its keyboard is attached to some sort of tape relay system, and then the key simply acts as a 'play' button. So when you press a key, the instrument's mechanism moves and plays a sound recorded on a magnetic tape. Contrary to popular belief, the tapes on a Mellotron are not loops - the recorded sample only lasts about 8 or 9 seconds and when it runs out, the sound stops, so you have to let go of the key and let the tape return to its starting position. Most Mellotron models use four-track tapes, so a single set of tapes for an instrument usually contains three different sounds, each recorded on one of the four tracks, and then you can switch between the samples. There's just a wonderful physics in the instrument that, for me, really translates into the sound. The Mellotron sound is attached to a lot of traditional music which I don't mind because I really like most of the popular music that the Mellotron is used in, but in my own music I try to erase those associations by using the instrument more directly. The Mellotron keyboard is not unlike the organ keyboard in that the sound comes and goes in a very on/off way. It's kind of interesting when you hear it on a Mellotron because the sample that sounds is often something that doesn't have as much attack or release, like strings. Usually when I use the Mellotron, I use less connotative samples, like French horn, clarinet or nylon string guitar. There are so many incredible brass and woodwind samples on the Mellotron!

You were invited to the festival Présences électronique by François Bonnet, in Paris in spring 2019 for a live performance with your modular synthesizer; we don't hear you much on the French scene; how was the concert and what did you learn from this experience?
It's true, I don't perform much in France for some reason; in fact, I think I've only played in Paris once, as well as in Lyon. I have of course been looking at the history of electronic music in France and to be able to work on a multichannel project in that context was quite meaningful. I don't do a lot of multichannel performances and in fact, in the past, I've had a bit of trouble with it. I'm interested in the idea, but to the extent that the experience is spatial, I have a hard time committing to a multichannel performance without having the ability to really immerse myself in the acoustic environment beforehand. I feel the same way about videos accompanying music; when done intentionally, it can be amazing, but it should never be added as an afterthought. So for this performance, I was able to have an idea of speaker placement in the room, which is critical to me, and I was able to develop a performance system that allowed me to incorporate live elements while playing pre-recorded sounds in a way that assigned different frequency spectrums to different parts of the room. There is an incredible listening device in this space and I was very pleased with the experience. It can be a challenge when playing in such an environment, as you are sitting in the worst place to hear how the sound interacts with the space through the speakers. The same is true for pipe organs: it is by no means a bad sound experience to sit right in front of the organ, but it is certainly different to sit at a distance and benefit from the acoustic environment of the room. So in this performance in Paris, it was very nice to be the performer and to be able to engage in real time with the sound but also to experience it in the space.

Minimalist music brings the question of sound to a more fundamental level, you say: what is the sound you want to hear?
I agree that minimal music brings sound to a more fundamental level, but only to the extent that one discusses the means or tools of practice. There is certainly something fundamental that is experienced in sound - sound for its own sake, the beauty of the essence - that interests me greatly, but I find it problematic to assume that reduced means necessarily equate to a minimalist experience. I think that in most minimalist music, the resulting sonic experience is actually quite complex. The problem is that this kind of experience is not common in most musical practices and is usually hidden behind other musical experiences associated with parameters such as melody and rhythm or the harmonic spectrum. For example, the harmonic spectrum is an incredibly deep dimension and it can be an extremely rich experience to immerse oneself in. To achieve this experience, however, the spectral quality itself must be brought to the fore. We experience the harmonic spectrum all the time in a very basic way through timbre - when we hear a violin, we know it is a violin and not a flute because we have trained our ears to associate the concept of 'violin' with a particular timbre. It is largely the richness of the violin's spectrum that generates its unique timbre.

In minimalist music, this 'essential' quality of sound itself, which is really a phenomenological experience, is brought to the fore and becomes the musical material. For me, it's really a simple and perhaps intuitive attraction to that kind of sound and that kind of listening. I was trained as a classical pianist and I remember when I was young I would hear certain chords in the music I was playing and I always wished that I could listen to those chords longer, that I could prolong that experience because I found the harmony and the harmonic texture of the moment so beautiful. So it was a natural inclination, I think, towards minimal music. I like the idea of inhabiting a sound, of digging into it and letting myself be invaded by the sound itself, by the timbre and the texture, not by the sound being used for something else. This kind of musical experience necessarily requires a minimalist approach. In the same way as my interest in long forms of music and stretched time; these are things that are necessary in a sense to achieve such an inner and vertical experience of sound, a harmonic experience of sound. Again, this is just my experience and I don't think it is in any way the only or even the first experience associated with such a broad musical practice.

Interview by Michèle Tosi

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