{"id":674013,"date":"2026-09-05T14:26:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T14:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/674013\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T14:26:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T14:26:47","slug":"sarah-davachi-the-will-of-tongues-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/674013\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Davachi: The Will of Tongues Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the destruction of many musicians\u2019 livelihood during the early years of this decade, but Davachi\u2014who was an early adopter of Bandcamp Friday, releasing a remarkable run of EPs in 2020\u2014points to another detrimental effect in a recent interview<\/a> with Bandcamp Daily. \u201cIt\u2019s gotten so much worse, this need for immediacy and digestibility,\u201d she said, explaining why her works this decade have grown longer. \u201cI was naturally leaning in those directions, but since Covid, I\u2019ve done it more intentionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

That might explain why she\u2019s chosen to stitch all these recent commissions back to back rather than allowing pieces like \u201cThe Rose Dialogues\u201d their own space to sprawl out. It\u2019s hard to glean a logic to the sequencing\u2014why all 46 minutes of \u201cThe Rose Dialogues\u201d are stitched end to end but \u201cSongs of the Smile\u2019s Fig\u201d is scattered throughout, why we get \u201cInterlude I,\u201d \u201cInterlude V,\u201d and \u201cInterlude II\u201d in that order with no sign of the other two.<\/p>\n

The press notes call this her most ambitious album. That seems like a byword for \u201clong,\u201d and The Will of Tongues feels more like a compilation than a durational work in itself, the way her three-hour audiovisual project Music for a Bellowing Room with Dicky Bahto did. It\u2019s hard to shake the sense that the hyper-alert, zoomed-in state of focus Davachi aims to facilitate with her music would be easier to attain in a concert setting than in a format that makes one yearn for simpler pleasures after a while.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another reason Davachi might be so eager to go long on this release, and it can be found in the text itself\u2014\u201cNothing expresses us after death, and I cried out, \u2018this is how the will of tongues is made.\u2019\u201d This is how the French lyrics of \u201cSongs of the Smile\u2019s Fig Pt. 3\u201d translate, and though it\u2019s credited to Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s \u201cThe Spectral Attitudes,\u201d you won\u2019t find it in any available translations of that poem\u2014in true Surrealist fashion, Davachi has reassembled the words for her own purposes. That purpose seems to reflect on her own legacy as an artist, and on how the human development of language is tied to our desire to be remembered, to live on in some way in a future we can\u2019t see for ourselves. Seen from this angle, The Will of Tongues is like a time capsule, a package future generations can excavate to confirm that, yes, Sarah Davachi did it her way, and all the rest of the world could do was slow down to catch up.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Sarah Davachi: The Will of Tongues<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The COVID-19 pandemic led to the destruction of many musicians\u2019 livelihood during the early years of this decade,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[12327,18,117,19,17,337,806],"class_list":["post-674013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-web"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117218905971888360","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}