The Will of Tongues is the new studio album by Sarah Davachi and, to date, her most ambitious work. Spanning more than two hours of music across three LPs, the album brings together five new solo compositions for historic pipe organs recorded in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands; a suite of three choral works; a collection of interludes for various microtonal ensembles; and a long-form chamber composition for string trio, organ, and tape.

The chamber work and the interludes were commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, while the choral cycle was commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland.

Alongside Davachi’s organ performances throughout the album, The Will of Tongues features an exceptional group of musicians and ensembles from across North America and Europe, including Whitney Johnson (viola), Eyvind Kang (viola), Lucy Railton (cello), Diapason—an experimental microtonal brass ensemble based in Los Angeles comprising Nev Wendell, Nicholas Ginsburg, Mattie Barbier, and Mason Moy—Phaedrus, a Renaissance flute consort based in Switzerland featuring Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, and Luis Martinez Pueyo, and Chamber Choir Ireland under the direction of Nils Schweckendiek.

The album engages many of the compositional concerns that have defined Davachi’s work over the past decade, including iteration, tuning theory, timbral and textural variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure. Rooted in the minimalist tradition from which she operates, these ideas are approached here with a heightened sense of clarity and intention. Across thirteen interconnected tracks, musical materials migrate between ensembles and instruments, gradually shifting in balance and perspective over the course of an unmistakably expansive listening experience.

As a unified body of work, however, The Will of Tongues is ultimately an exploration of listening itself. The music proposes attentive listening as a form of imaginative negative space—one that encourages confrontation, reflection, and creation rather than escape. This is not easy listening, nor is it intended to be. Through extended durations and the deliberate reduction of material, the listener is invited to encounter sound on its own terms and to engage with the psychological and emotional landscapes that emerge from sustained attention.

The Will of Tongues is therefore a celebration of deep listening and intense engagement: an affirmation of intimate sonic experience and the expansive inner worlds it can reveal.

 

“Nothing expresses us beyond death, and I sometimes cried out: ‘That is how the will of tongues is made!’”

Silver Lion

In addition to the release of The Will of Tongues, Sarah Davachi has been awarded the Silver Lion at the 2026 Venice Biennale in recognition of her distinctive contribution to contemporary electroacoustic music.

The Silver Lion honours emerging artists—whether composers, performers, or ensembles—whose work has made an outstanding and innovative impact on contemporary music. Previous recipients include Dai Fujikura (2017), Sebastian Rivas (2018), Matteo Franceschini (2019), Neue Vocalsolisten (2021), Ars Ludi (2022), and Ensemble Modern (2024).

The jury citation reads:

“Over the course of a decade and a half, Sarah Davachi has built a body of work that meticulously and rigorously explores the intricacies of timbre and time, redefining the listening experience through a practice that merges historical research, the phenomenology of perception, and electroacoustic experimentation. Her compositions, often founded on extended durations and natural tuning systems, render perceptible the slightest variations in texture, intonation, and harmonic complexity, foregrounding psychoacoustic phenomena and processes of gradual timbral transformation.

 

Davachi’s work occupies a territory in which the structures of minimalism, early music concepts of intervallic relation and affect, and the experimental production practices of the studio environment converge, often centred on the use of analogue electronic instruments and the pipe organ.”

For the 2026 Biennale Musica, Davachi will present the world premiere of a new work for acoustic ensemble. Upcoming projects also include a new composition for GBSR Duo, commissioned by Kings Place and premiering in September 2026. Designed as an immersive sound environment, the work will make extensive use of the venue’s d&b audiotechnik sound system in Hall Two.

In April 2027, Davachi will join James McVinnie and the LA Phil New Music Group for the premiere of a new organ work commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of its Green Umbrella series.

Beyond her acclaimed discography, Davachi has toured and performed extensively worldwide. Her work has been presented by institutions including Southbank Centre, the Barbican, INA grm, Kontraklang, Elbphilharmonie, MoMA, and the Getty. Her commissioned and collaborative projects include works for the London Contemporary Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, Harmonic Space Orchestra, Apartment House, Ghost Ensemble, and Wild Up.

In 2020, she founded Late Music, an imprint within Warp Records’ partner labels division. Over the past six years, Late Music has documented much of Davachi’s prolific output, including studio albums, compilations, live recordings, box sets, a three-hour film collaboration, and, most recently, the imprint’s first book publication, From the Ruins of the Literal—a volume based on Davachi’s doctoral dissertation on critical organology, timbre, and the poetics of affect.