The Head as Form'd in the Crier's Choir (Vinyl 2LP)

Silent friend of those far from us, feeling how your breath is still enlarging space, fill the sombre belfry with your pealing. Late Music is pleased to present a new collection of music for chamber ensembles and for solo performers - for organs, strings, trombones, woodwinds, voices, electronics - make the crier’s a choir, we say!

The compositions on this album, written between 2022 and 2024, form a conceptual suite and an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune and memorialize and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation. To this end, The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir engages two references to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus: Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a collection of poems from 1922, and Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo, an early baroque opera from 1607. The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir follows on from the last two albums, which were attempts to begin bridging the gap between the fixed electroacoustic pieces that emerge in Davachi’s home studio and her slow-paced, somewhat open-form chamber writing, in which each performance presents a new structure and in which each iteration offers the path to a new composition and deeper meaning.

Alongside Davachi, featured musicians on this album are Andrew McIntosh (viola, Los Angeles), Mattie Barbier (trombone, Los Angeles), Lisa McGee (mezzo-soprano, Los Angeles), Pierre-Yves Martel (viola da gamba, Montréal), Eyvind Kang (viola d’amore, Los Angeles), and Rebecca Lane (bass flute, Berlin), Sam Dunscombe (bass clarinet, Berlin), Michiko Ogawa (bass clarinet, Berlin), M.O. Abbott (trombone, Berlin), and Weston Olencki (trombone, Berlin) of the Harmonic Space Orchestra (Winds).

Tracklist:

1. Prologo
2. Possente Spirto
3. The Crier’s Choir
4. Trio For A Ground
5. Res Sub Rosa
6. Constants
7. Night Horns