Sarah Davachi - Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds (film by Dicky Bahto).
Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds functions as a precise entry point into The Will of Tongues, the new album by Sarah Davachi, which will be released by Late Music on 28 August 2026.
It is a large-scale project: thirteen pieces, more than two hours of music, and a triple-vinyl edition, bringing together compositions for historic organs, choral writing, interludes for microtonal ensembles, and an extensive chamber work for string trio, organ, and tape.
Recorded on 13 December 2025 at the Église Saint-Léger in Leymen, France, Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds belongs to the Interludes series, developed by Davachi during her residency at EMPAC between 2024 and 2025.
The piece begins from the so-called “unison canon”, but in its harmonic articulation it introduces minimal displacements between the performers: some voices move slightly ahead of others, opening the unison into unstable dyads and triads. The music seems to rest on an extreme austerity, yet this reduction does not impoverish the act of listening; on the contrary, it intensifies it.
Davachi has pointed out that this is not easy music, nor does it intend to be: when prolonged duration is joined with a radical reduction of materials, the ear is forced to confront sound itself. This is why the piece can sustain a single note for a minute and a half: not as simple contemplation, but as a form of perceptual confrontation.
Listening becomes an imaginative negative space, a place that does not invite escape, but rather creation, attention, and direct contact with sonic matter.
Dicky Bahto’s film, made by a regular collaborator of Davachi, extends that experience through image, while the performance by Phaedrus (a consort of Renaissance transverse flutes formed by Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, and Luis Martinez Pueyo), turns every minute variation into a new harmonic tension.
