Friday, January 26th, ISSUE is pleased to present Canadian composer Sarah Davachi and Philadelphia-based artist Gabi Losoncy performing new work. Their varying practices span Davachi’s disclosure of the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural space to Losoncy’s unlayered, utilitarian audio experiments -- both charting critical new contexts for experimental composition and sound art.
Davachi presents work for reed organ, violin, viola da gamba, and electronics that was first premiered in Los Angeles at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in October, 2017. Based upon displaced melodic movements that were originally developed through a series of improvisations for pipe organ, this piece attempts to balance instances of consonance and dissonance, both in frequency content and physical gesture between its three players.
The open strings of the violin and viola da gamba – a Renaissance-Baroque instrument with seven strings tuned in a manner similar to the lute and modern guitar – are often isolated in order to fully emphasize the natural harmonics of the instrument. The electronic component, created using an EMS Synthi synthesizer, reinforces many of these pitches but occupies a subtle and unstable presence in the mix, slightly blurring the source of the effect.
Applying various performative strategies on a case-by-case basis, Gabi Losoncy presents either a small, unamplified "playing" of something, or, possibly, a presentation of something from her phone. In either case, the behaviors of the performance are minimal and pliant. Losoncy’s recent works include HH (the final release on Graham Lambkin’s KYE imprint), an LP described as “two sides of psychologically dense nothingness,” and Security Besides Love released on Recital, an account voyeuristically documenting the artist’s life, work, and habitats.
Sarah Davachi is a Canadian composer of electronic and electroacoustic music, currently based in Los Angeles where she is a doctoral student in musicology. She also holds a master's degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College in Oakland, California, where she studied with Maggi Payne and James Fei. Her compositional projects are primarily concerned with disclosing the delicate psychoacoustics of intimate aural spaces, utilizing extended durations and simple harmonic structures that emphasize subtle variations in overtone complexity and natural resonances. The instrumentation she employs is varied, including analog synthesizers, electric and acoustic pipe organs, piano, orchestral strings, and woodwinds, with mutual idioms often layered in textural counterpoint. Her work as a researcher concerns aspects of organology, archival study, and phenomenology. Since 2007, Davachi has also had the unique opportunity to work for the National Music Centre in Canada as an interpreter and content developer of their collection of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments. She has held artist residencies at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff, Canada), STEIM (Amsterdam, Netherlands), WORM (Rotterdam, Netherlands), EMS (Stockholm, Sweden), OBORO (Montréal, Canada), and MESS (Melbourne, Australia), and is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and SOCAN. In addition to her recorded output, including 2017's All My Circles Run on Students of Decay and 2016's Vergers on Important Records, Davachi has toured extensively across the globe, including recent appearances in Europe, Australia, and Japan, and has shared the stage with artists such as Donald Buchla, Aki Onda, Grouper, Arnold Dreyblatt, John Bender, Alessandro Cortini, Oren Ambarchi, Aaron Dilloway, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Loren Connors, and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Gabi Losoncy is a young woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who makes various decisions with outer consequences based on how she feels, and to the end of expressing how she feels. Generally working in unlayered, linear audio since her time as a member of Good Area, she expands her practice on a case-by-case basis, making great effort not to do anything unnecessary. She has released and has relationships with Alien Passengers, c a d u c., Impulsive Habitat, Recital, and Kye, and has recently released a book, Second Person, with Philip and Sarah Best's Amphetamine Sulphate imprint.