Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first
release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest
artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within
a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi
unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both
contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave
In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred
and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting
new way to hear the sounds that exist around us.
Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi
lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the
summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and
lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while
surrounded by such storied history. This latest album echoes that
emotional state of solitude and ephemerality, reaching towards
familiar musical landscapes but from oblique perspectives.
"I named each track after a particular time of day as a way
of expressing my experiencing different moments of quietude,
how morning and night are both independent and interconnected
entities in this regard," she says. Her titles evoke canonical
phrases referring to morning or evening prayers, as well as
Latin and German phrasings for metaphors about the time of
day. "From my perspective, there is a lot of loneliness on this
record, and I think it is as much about beginnings as endings,"
she continues. "In a way, it's about the prospect of the unknown
as it manifests alongside a very inward form of grieving-really
the essence of what constitutes a period of transition.
Davachi has mined a bottomless landscape where listeners
can witness music's participation in their solitudes. Gave In Rest
lends a voice to her personal exploration with a firm, intuitive
stance.
