In her Chicago debut, composer Sarah Davachi premieres new work for Lampo—a composition for vintage synthesizers, harmonium and two cellos that explores the acoustics of the Stony Island Arts Bank, with a lush sound to take listeners inward.

She performs with cellists Fred Lonberg-Holm and Kimberly Sutton, amid Glenn Ligon’s installation, A Small Band.

Davachi is interested in “the experience of enveloped sonic dwelling,” as she puts it, or the melding of real and mental space, where electronic and acoustic spectra blend and become indistinguishable, especially in relation to minute variations in frequency. She is also fascinated by the limits of stillness in sound. Davachi’s music is stripped down to very basic harmonic progressions that shift gradually, sharing more common ground with the long-form minimalism of Éliane Radigue than with her contemporaries in the current synthesizer resurgence.

Sarah Davachi (b.1987, Calgary, Canada) is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music. Trained at Mills College, she is engaged in practices of analog synthesis, psychoacoustic manipulations, multi-channel sound diffusion, and studio composition. Her compositional projects are primarily concerned with disclosing the antiquated instruments and forgotten sonics of a bygone era in synthesis, with concurrent treatment of acoustic sources—particularly organs, strings and woodwinds. Since 2007, she also has worked for the National Music Centre in Canada as a researcher and archivist of their collection of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments. She has held artist residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts; EMS, Stockholm; OBORO, Montreal; and STEIM, Amsterdam. Davachi resides between Vancouver and Montreal.

Presented in partnership with Rebuild Foundation

Artist Talk: Sarah Davachi provides an overview of how psychoacoustics and preoccupations with perception and experience factored into experimental music in the 1970s, drawing connections from these practices to her own work. Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #1656. Friday, January 27, 6 p.m.