Words by Sean Victory
Sean Victory is a lifelong artist, tinkerer, and musician. His current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan. His new dark electronic band A Tomb Full of Stars will release their debut album in September 2026.
The Will of Tongues by Sarah Davachi (Late Music)
There are always other ways to think about what music is, what it is capable of. At this moment in time I must’ve been ready to finally connect meaningfully with Sarah Davachi’s work. I have appreciated her past albums in small doses, and I frequently felt myself losing the thread, growing impatient or distracted. On The Will of Tongues, I feel able to hear and follow the larger shapes that her minimalist compositions intentionally withhold. “Intentionally withhold” seems to have a negative connotation, but the aim of building music with sustained tones and progressions that drip like molasses is to bring the focus back to the moment. We are drawn into these sonic instances, watching them stretch out behind us, in front of us, rising up and around our ears.
Another stumbling block I had to step over is thinking about her work as ambient or drone. It would be easy to throw on any of these tracks at random, and quickly lump the work into those genres. In this regard I also allowed myself to mislead myself. The interplay of timbres, the beating or warble between two notes is where the heart of the music lives. Push away from the need to move forward, or think in reverse, everything we need exists in the now. Ever unfurling, as if the right side of the screen wraps back from the left, never leaving the true center.
This is the core of Davachi’s work, both here and elsewhere in her discography. Her organ performances provide a template for the unfamiliar or the trying listener. So if you find yourself in this position, lean your ear to the five solo performances on Tongues: “Canto Duo,” “The Second Tuning,” “Four Narrow Forms,” “The First Tuning,” and “Canto Solo”. Vocals, winds, and strings are featured elsewhere on the album, but the pipe organ encompasses these natural and synthetic sounds all on its own. Across the instrument’s keys are the breathy intonation of reeds and winds, the hum of strings, and the tonal consensus of a choir. Many years have passed in my own attempts to connect with Davachi’s music, but it was in hearing the sweeping ambition in The Will of Tongues that I am able to look back on her work with a better way of comprehending the magic operating discreetly inside this limited palette of tones.
Splayed Werks by Tyondai Braxton (Erased Tapes)
Splayed Werks serves as a compendium of Tyondai Braxton’s compositional skills. The joy of sound making is on full display in these songs. “Multiplay II” is a perfect example of how Braxton is comfortable switching directions mid-song. Combining shuffling percussion with bird song, mixed with odd asynchronous bass lines, screaming synths in descent, stirred together with see-sawing sound design that skips across the stereo field. With these parts in crescendo we arrive at the 2-minute mark where everything falls away. A generic tone blips up from the silence, clanging at regular intervals. It sounds like a countdown klaxon from a sci-fi film, and it was enough to make me laugh a little. It is the lone tone for only four counts, and then it ushers in screeches and warbles before skipping on its merry way when Braxton once more compels everything to change places.
Little details like this speak to his maturity as a composer. He has a way of being self-indulgent without being obnoxious. I have to imagine he made that space klaxon tone for just this purpose. In limiting it to four counts and following it with the frenetic rhythms and rich synth tones of the rest of the song, he’s able to create a dialog between himself, the song, and the listener. He laughingly throws levers, flips switches, and pulls patches. He invites us to be in on the joke, and having grabbed our interest we find his playfulness in music making is a mark of his skill and not a mask for amateurism.
Adding to this wondrous display Braxton pulls in sounds from all directions. Vocal samples, field recordings, classic Moog filter sweeps with big bassy bottoms, digital and analog artefacts, are just a few of the colors on his palette. Beyond the inclusion of these recognizable sounds, he finds a way to give each their own space by understanding the harmonic content and sonic weight they carry. A claustrophobic sequence of synths may be split in two by clicking sticks or the brush of a cymbal. Again, these intrusions on their own don’t make the magic trick possible, but the extra room noise of the mic that captured these sounds, panning and placement, so spectacularly shatters the hermetically sealed digital world that a headphone listener may spin their head left and right to check their surroundings.
“Splay” in the title seems informative enough. We as listeners will be tossed hither and yon, pushed down into our interior world and blasted into the farthest reaches of our imaginations.
Honorable Mentions
Thinking Music (For Just Intonation Rhodes Piano) by Ka Baird (Lobby Art Editions)
Quite similar to Sarah Davachi’s The Will of Tongues, Ka Baird focuses their lens on the singular sound of the Rhodes electric piano. It’s a magical instrument all on its own. Used across genres, and on about fifteen million records since its creation in the 1950s, Ka Baird strips away the band or performers that typically accompany the instrument.
These are quiet songs, held close to our ears. Like holding a seashell to our ear, they seem to contain something other inside their simple forms. With four songs averaging around ten minutes each, they are long enough and spare enough to allow for a sense of time dilation.
To really get the full effect here, it’s best to try some headphone listening. Even on my hi-fi speakers I felt I was missing something. The songs move forward with an irregularity that seems a result of the instrument itself, making it easy to note that the artist has made listening an important part of creating. The tines when struck create a dissonance or consonance between the ears, subtle undulations that create shape and color from varied vibrations. If you’re listening deeply enough and allow yourself the space to visit these songs, you should feel like you’re a part of the instrument. Hanging somewhere in the interior and teleporting along the keybed to be held and mutated by vibration.
Mentions (not without honor, just without text)
Mere Mortals by Floating Points (Deutsche Grammophon)
Isle Peaks by Bitchin Bajas (Drag City)
Dance of the Sun by Katatonic Silentio (Krisis Publishing)
Mercury by Upper Wilds (Thrill Jockey)
I Wander by Djrum (Houndstooth)
Alien Metal by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (p(doom) Records)
Object Language by Andrew Tasselmyer (We All Speak In Poems)
CICATRIZES DO FUTURO by Deafkids (Neurot Recordings)