Sarah Davachi - Canto Solo (The Will of Tongues 2026).
In “Canto Solo, ” a preview of The Will of Tongues (Sarah Davachi’s new album, due for release on August 28, 2026, via Late Music), the Canadian composer returns to the organ as a space for acoustic investigation. Recorded at Amsterdam’s Orgelpark on the Van Straten organ, a reconstruction of an instrument dating from 1479, the piece works with a deliberately restricted palette of timbres, thirds, and sixths.
The accompanying film, made by Dicky Bahto, extends that same restrained sensitivity, never imposing itself on the music and allowing image, space, and duration to breathe alongside it. Davachi is not seeking the organ’s customary monumentality here, but rather a way into the interior of sound itself: the air moving through the pipes, minute variations in tuning, and that almost imperceptible zone in which an apparently stable note begins to reveal a life of its own.
The piece perfectly embodies the more ambitious character of The Will of Tongues, a work that pushes years of research into duration, timbre, and tuning systems to their furthest conclusions. Its minimalism is deceptive: on a superficial listen it may seem static, but sustained attention reveals beating patterns, harmonics, timbral shifts, and subtle internal tensions that continually transform the material. “Canto Solo” demands patience, but it also rewards that patience, turning a small number of intervallic relationships into an extraordinarily rich acoustic field, somewhere between early music, drone, and contemporary experimental composition.
But the true depth of “Canto Solo” emerges when we stop hearing the organ merely as an instrument and begin to perceive it as a presence. Davachi reduces the music almost to the point of stripping it of intention: it does not seem to want to lead us anywhere, but rather to keep us inside the sound long enough for it to begin unfolding everything it contains. The notes are sustained until they become breath, friction, and matter.
Within that extreme duration, time ceases to feel like forward motion and begins to feel like depth. Davachi does not need the music to “happen”; it is enough to sustain the sound for long enough that it begins to reveal what lies within it. “Canto Solo” thus reaches one of the most essential ideas in her music: the less that happens on the surface, the more intense our perception becomes of what remains underneath.
