SARAH DAVACHI on Pipe Organ + Chuck Johnson

Doors 8pm, Performances start  shortly after 8:35pm, please plan to arrive within that window of time to enjoy a refreshment, experience the art exhibition, and choose your seat to best avoid disrupting the performances. Thanks!

SARAH DAVACHI is a composer whose work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. The instrumentation she employs is varied, including electric organ, pipe and reed organ, tape-replay samplers, voice and choir, analog synthesizers, piano, and both modern and early strings, brass, and woodwinds. Similarly informed by minimalist and long-form tenets, baroque leanings toward slow-moving chordal suspension, and experimental production practices of the recording studio environment, in her sound is manifest an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions and apprehensions of the familiar and the distant. She holds a master’s degree in electronic music and recording media from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral candidate in musicology at UCLA, focusing on timbre, phenomenology, and critical organology.

CHUCK JOHNSON is a composer and musicia residing in Oakland, CA. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on pedal steel guitar, experimental electronics, alternate tuning systems, and composing for film and television. Recordings of his work have been published by VDSQ, Thrill Jockey, Temporary Residence, Kompakt, Ghostly, Trouble in Mind, Scissor Tail, Merge, and Three Lobed, among others. – his solo pedal steel guitar debut – delivers what Pitchfork has described as “singular,” and “a mournful hymn built out of layers of sliding strings, cascading with a zenlike stateliness…” He holds an MFA in Electronic Music and Intermedia Art from Mills College.