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Doors 6:30pm / Show 7pm
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Sarah Davachi’s music pays close attention to the rumblings under the surface. Her work Basso Continuo, commissioned by Ghost Ensemble, stretches the Baroque practice of harmonic accompaniment to an extreme duration. Woodwinds work through a glacial counterpoint, anchored by low-end strings of two contrabasses, cello, and viola, and scaffolded by a retuned harp and ensemble leader Ben Richter’s custom just intonation accordion. Like much of Davachi’s work, the real action happens in the phenomenological experience beyond the notation. Close interactions of microtones ripple and waver, with a just intonation tuning involving the prime number seven—a favorite of minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, particularly in his The Well-Tuned Piano—and occasional glides of intervallic spans smaller than a semitone. Davachi’s work invites a harmonic listening in between stasis and motion, where the physical body of the instrument and resonance of the room are constantly in play with one another.
On their program at The Lab, Ghost Ensemble also performs work by their mentor and central artistic figure Pauline Oliveros along with Teodora Stepančić’s Harp N Ropes No. 4—commissioned by Ghost Ensemble in 2016—and the late drone legend Phill Niblock’s Exploratory for ensemble and prerecorded amplified accordion. The performance of Niblock’s work will be accompanied by projections of films from his landmark minimalist series The Movement of People Working.
Katherine Liberovskaya presents a program of her own video work, as well as her collaborations with Niblock, at Artists Television Access on Sunday, April 6, 2025.
Ghost Ensemble’s performance at The Lab is made possible with the support of the Violet World Foundation. The Lab’s contemporary chamber music programming is supported in part by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and the Amphion Foundation.
Program
Pauline Oliveros, The Well & The Gentle
Teodora Stepančić, Harp N Ropes No. 4
intermission
Sarah Davachi, Basso Continuo
Phill Niblock, Exploratory
About the Artists
Ghost Ensemble creates experimental music that expands our perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Blurring borders of genre, style, and scene, the ensemble collaborates widely with creators of contemporary chamber music, avant-garde jazz, and sound art, amplifying underrepresented, highly original musical voices to explore the most innovative and exciting music of our time. The ensemble’s recent collaborators have included Marguerite Brown, Sarah Davachi, Catherine Lamb, James Ilgenfritz, Sky Macklay, Miya Masaoka, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Ben Richter, Teodora Stepančić, Lester St. Louis, and Yasunao Tone.
Sarah Davachi’s 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. Similarly informed by minimalist and longform tenets, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that reconsiders perceptions of the familiar and the distant. Davachi has collaborated with artists such as Ellen Arkbro, Oren Ambarchi, Grouper, William Basinski, Catherine Lamb, Michael Pisaro, Loren Connors, Tashi Wada, David Rosenboom, and Charlemagne Palestine; commissions include large-scale works for Quatuor Bozzini, London Contemporary Orchestra, Yarn/Wire, Apartment House, Wild Up, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.