When the held chord, all wavering sine waves, gives way to something else, when that foregrounded drone — somehow both a mainstay of experimental electronic music, and also the easiest of easy listenings — becomes background, and when that something else that comes to the fore is a piano, then something is most certainly up.
The initial chord is, soon, layered with another, higher chord, and the combination yields slow moving gusts of moiré patterns. The pair sandwiches the sequence of gentle piano phrases. The eternal hold of those chords balances against, contrasts with, the natural quieting of each struck piano figure, which are spaced out to draw focused attention. This is “Perfumes III,” the initial track release from the forthcoming album Pale Bloom, due out at the end of May from Sarah Davachi.
Davachi has made a name for herself in recent years as a thoughtful and dedicated synthesizer musician, and Pale Bloom apparently is a reunion of sorts, connecting back to an instrument of her youth. On this track, Hammond organ is a source of the droning backdrop to her piano. (Update: Contrary to what I initially wrote here, the album’s 20-minute track, “If It Pleased Me to Appear to You Wrapped in This Drapery,” contains no synthesizers, Davachi let me know via Twitter: “that track is just strings and organ.”)
Track originally posted at sarahdavachi.bandcamp.com. More from Davachi at sarahdavachi.com.