Sarah Davachi has released Laurus, a footnote to her Cantus, Descant album, an 80-minute meditation on impermanence, released in September.

Laurus demonstrates Davachi’s more raw and improvisational composition process in its early stages. Its six tracks are the first recordings the Canadian sound artist gathered when she began working on Cantus, Descant in August of 2017, a week before she moved from Canada to Los Angeles. She did several recording sessions at Pacific Spirit United Church in Vancouver and Chapelle Saint-Louis in Montréal on two organs from 1964 and 1916 respectively.

“Ruminant,” from Cantus, Descant, comes from the Vancouver sessions and is “thematically related” to the Laurus I-III series, we’re told.

Moreover, “‘Accord of Voice I” was the “seedling” of Cantus, Descant, even though it didn’t make it to the album, Davachi says. She still performs it for herself when she’s starting with any particular organ as a way of getting her head in the right place.

Davachi is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA, where she works on the aesthetic phenomenology of musical instruments and timbre in popular, experimental, and early music. She balances this with life as a sought-after recording and touring artist, driven by the same curiosity that kickstarted her career over two decades ago.

For more information on Davachi, check out here XLR8R Influences podcast here.

Tracklisting

01. Herber Well
02. Laurus I
03. Laurus II
04. Accord of Voice I
05. Accord of Voice II
06. Laurus III

Laurus LP is available digitally and on cassette now. You can order it here and stream it in full below.