The first time I can remember seeing Sarah Davachi play was at a former porno theater-turned-club in Vancouver in March 2015. The setup was a bit unusual for the venue, which typically hosted touring DJs and '80s nights. The dance floor was covered in chairs and tables, and the room was lit mostly by candle, in addition to some spectral, purple-hued visuals. Davachi looped the droning tones of her violin and paired them with an old EMS Synthi AKS.

Though Davachi's performance was relatively short, it is etched into my memory. I still remember what that room sounded like, looked like, smelled like. It's this eerie interaction with rooms and spaces—and the way that these environments shape sound—that makes Davachi's style of minimalist music connect with audiences around the world. Though she doesn't like the term "drone," you might call Davachi the current star of drone, with releases for many of ambient and experimental music's most sought-after labels.

That performance marked the release of Barons Court, Davachi's debut album, released on the cult ambient label Students Of Decay. Each song is named after a place: "Ruislip" and "Wood Green" in London, "Tiergarten" in Berlin. The LP was rooted in the violin and synthesizer, which were her signature instruments for the first few years of her career. But these offer only a hint at Davachi's obsession with space and environment, as well as travel and movement, which would come to shape her compositions and her process.

Davachi's music often documents the room as much as it documents her playing. Sometimes she records in hotel rooms, other times in centuries-old churches. Each recording has its own clear personality, and she forms relationships with these spaces and the instruments that occupy them.

The instrument she has forged the strongest bond with is the pipe organ. As her career has allowed her to tour more, she has increasingly incorporated the awe-inspiring instrument—different units from around the world—which has completely altered her perspective on composition and recording. Pipe organs are huge instruments that manipulate the air they reverberate through in a way hardly matched by any other musical device. But they also depend on the space around them to convey their their quirks and intricacies, subtle things you can hear on Davachi's many organ recordings.

Davachi's favourite example of this synergy is at The Museum Of Jurassic Technology, a truly bizarre institution tucked away behind an unassuming storefront on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. It's a spooky place whose reference to the "Lower Jurassic" is nonsensical, and whose exhibits consist of psuedo-science and folklore, most of it false (or at least ambiguous in origin). It's a place where time stands still, both in the arcane objects and musty, carpet-deadened atmosphere. It feels like a vision of the future conjured up by a Victorian. The museum is at different stages creepy, cute and illuminating, with several legendary rooms known to occult-loving LA residents, and even a dove sanctuary on the top floor.

The pipe organ Davachi played at the museum is located on an upper floor, beside an antiquated tea room and inside a dark space where the walls are decorated with artistic portraits of the dogs sent into outer space by the Soviet Union.

"The Museum feels like my second home in LA," Davachi tells me over the phone from Tucson, Arizona, where she's spending the weekend celebrating her birthday with her partner. "It's like walking into a different world, which puts you in a different mental space. You can walk around being in these wonderful imaginary worlds, and it straddles this place between reality and weird, made-up worlds. I probably went there ten different times before I recorded anything."

The Museum Of Jurassic Technology Tea Room

The Museum Of Jurassic Technology is where Davachi made the most powerful recordings on her new album Cantus, Descant. On the ten-minute "Midlands," in some ways the LP's centrepiece, you can hear the room, its strange mix of occult and real history, the stillness, the pipe organ breathing in the dank air. At several points the track stops before picking up again, as if taking a rest. This is an organic, living composition, in spite of its simplicity: "Midlands" is just a few tones sustained for minutes at a time.

Cantus, Descant is, depending on how you count, Davachi's seventh or eighth album since Barons Court came out in 2015. She has hopscotched across labels, from prestigious outlets such as Ba Da Bing! and Important Records to headier places like W.25th, Constellation Tatsu and Recital, which is run by her partner, Sean McCann, another experimental music luminary. In the past five years it's felt like everyone wanted a piece of Davachi's work, and she's happily delivered, expanding her sound across more than ten albums. Highlights include the disciplined yet creative All My Circles Run, which focuses on pieces for singular instruments or voice, and the delicate solo piano of Pale Bloom.

This fall marks a new era of Davachi's work with the launch of her new label, Late Music. The name is a pun on "early music," a term for music spanning the Medieval to Baroque eras. But in spite of the joke, "late music" is actually pretty descriptive. Hers is an approach couched in modernity (electronics, loop pedals) but rooted in ideas and instruments from the past, like pipe organs that date back to the 16th century.

Cantus, Descant is the first release on Late Music, and it might be Davachi's magnum opus, at least so far. It's the classic double LP that artists once made at the peak of their career—sprawling, varied, full of experiments and detours. The meat of Cantus, Descant is still made from organ recordings from around the world—some dynamic, some soothingly still—but it also features two tracks with Davachi singing actual songs for the first time. The style suits her: "Play The Ghost" and "Canyon Walls," both post-punk laments somewhere between Captured Tracks and Blackest Ever Black, open up new paths for her future work to explore. But they're gone as soon as they arrived, swallowed up by the huge organ recordings around them.

A few diversions aside, Cantus, Descant contains what Davachi is best at: compositions made up of a few notes from an instrument or two, carefully layered and played so that they start to pirouette and dovetail in your mind, playing tricks on your senses. Are they changing or is it just your imagination? The pipe organ lends itself naturally to this: notes naturally decay and warp as the air passes through the chambers, hitting unfamiliar, almost queasy tones and creating ghostly textures. The pipe organs have a grandiose, sometimes weary sound all of their own.

"The organ at the Museum Of Jurassic Technology is one of two organs on Cantus, Descant that is just completely acoustic and mechanical," she explained. "It doesn't need electricity. You have to pump it with your feet. Those reed organs can be a little bit difficult, they need a lot of air, and it's a bit of a workout because you have to put a lot of air into it. But the nice thing about this one is, on modern organs it's just air going directly into the instrument from an electric boiler. With this one you're controlling the amount of air that's going into it. You're putting less or more in to control the harmonics of the instrument, which is just another way of controlling the sound of the instrument that you don't get with modern organs."

She added: "The other organ I use on the record is this one from Amsterdam at this place called The Orgelpark—basically a building with a bunch of organs. This one is a reconstructed organ from 1479, and it's also all acoustic. It's a big pipe organ. I was playing it while another person was pumping air, and then there are like four or five fellows helping pump the air."

Davachi's love of organs goes back to one of her earliest jobs, working at the National Music Centre in Calgary. It hosts a world-class collection of instruments—famous and obscure, old and new, acoustic and electronic—and is perhaps surprisingly located in Alberta—Canada's oil-boom equivalent of Texas, and the province where Davachi is originally from.

"I started working there in 2007, when it was still just a foundation, before anybody knew what it was," she said. "I was the person who was there every Sunday to give tours, but in the dead of January there would be nobody coming for weeks at a time. So I had all this time I was paid to be there and I didn't have anything else to do. I got into the habit of picking an instrument, going home to research it and then when I went back on Sunday, I would spend an hour playing or getting to know it. I learned synthesizers around the same time. I would set the oscillators in tune and then just listen to them drift on their own, like, natural design. It was the same with organs, playing an octave and listening to the natural fluctuations."

Following her tenure at the National Music Centre, Davachi moved to California to attend Mills College in Oakland, where she studied for a master's degree in electronic music and recording media. It was here that she connected her love for the sounds she made at the NMC with an actual musical movement: first she discovered Alvin Curran and the Musica Elettronica Viva group, then La Monte Young and Éliane Radigue, artists who mixed electronic and acoustic instruments. They awoke something in her that changed the way she thought about music, or at least confirmed something she had always felt.

"Even when I listen to pop music, I listen to the production and small things in the background that maybe most people wouldn't hear or wouldn't care about that much," she said. "So then I realized that you could make music that was not really about these overarching ideas of melody or whatever, but that you could make music out of the actual material, out of the sound experience itself, or the details of the sound and the instrument that was used to make it."

"Anything that can sustain in an interesting way is really important to me," she adds. "I'm very much drawn to sustain. Things that can be sustained, but then also change in a really subtle way while you're actually in the moment of playing it. And what I try to do is make the electronics sound as much a part of the organ as possible—like it would be an organ piece with electronics that would emerge out of it in a very subtle way. But it can be complicated because a lot of the time organs are oddly oriented, like they're not made for an extra table. So it varies—sometimes I've had to have the electronics behind me and play them blindly as I'm facing the organ."

After graduating from Mills with a thesis piece written for organ and electronics, Davachi began to develop her signature style:thin approachable yet still rooted in the fundamentals of minimalism. It's hard to describe what makes her music so appealing to a relatively wide audience, but it probably comes down to emotion. Davachi has a way of communicating long, drawn-out melodies so that they're easy to understand—it's hard to imagine anyone getting bored listening to the meditative hum of her music.

Though the music is minimalist, it's not simple or easy. Davachi's songwriting process comes down to a sense of pacing learned from the masters and then honed over years of touring into something more personal. Many of her songs are made from improvisations whittled down into shorter chunks, though she's become better at realizing her ideas more purposefully. With electronics, she explains, it's easier to fool around, press record, edit things down later. But once her work became more temporal—like with the pipe organs that can't be carted around to different places—she had less time to experiment, and efficiency became key. It was around this time that the room became so important to her work, because the space around the pipe organ is like an instrument in itself. Talking to Davachi about anything to do with music, it pretty much always comes down to organs.

"I never really thought about pacing and songwriting so much before, but I noticed it with the pipe organ. Organs take up so much space and it's so much easier to get enveloped in the sound," she said. "It's also about being able to hear the space, including the harmonic space that's being created by the sound, and knowing when it needs to move onto something else. For me, creating a piece isn't just holding down a note. It's about knowing when to move on, and that's been increasingly tied to emotional responses, and less to theoretical ideas, in the last few years."

Davachi has sat at many organs in many rooms around the world, and she'll sit at many more in the future. I get the feeling that she'll never tire of it—for her, the centuries-old instrument offers limitless possibilities, especially with the electronics she subtly incorporates into her pieces. Every time she plays the same note, it comes out differently. It's this passion for the organ, which also informs her work with other instruments, that makes every new record feel vital and different, even when the fundamentals are largely the same.

The Davachi's discography is so strong because each record feels like a new iteration of the same idea, a consistent approach and feeling that unites all her work. This is a a continual process that began with studying musical theory and history, which led to her making new compositions that imprint their own personal touch on a rich musical legacy, creating new layers each time until the roots form a strong, sturdy base for new branches.

Each Davachi record has its own theme, and sometimes its own sound palette, but they all come from the same place, whether it's the more traditional drone of The Untuning Of The Sky or the massive yet intricate fluctuations of the pipe organ on Cantus, Descant. On the one hand, the new album represents an inflection point in her discography, pointing to new directions she might head in. But she also said she was already working on several organ records, in addition to, maybe, an album of vocal songs.

Just don't hold your breath for anything radically different: Davachi's art is about patience, refinement and happenstance, the magic that can happen in a specific room with a specific instrument, magic that can't be easily repeated. Each new LP reveals a slight shift in perspective and emotion, gradually changing just like the sustained notes of a pipe organ. Her work is profoundly minimalist in almost every way, which makes her one of the style's most vital modern artists.

"There's always a new way of interacting with an instrument or a new way of thinking about it," she said. "So it's not weird to me to keep looking at different iterations of the same sort of idea. Even with the most simple musical ideas, you get to a certain place from repeating things and playing around with things, then trying them again and seeing them in a different way. That idea of, like, everything that you do as a musician needs to be new and completely different and you can't do what you did before. I think it's just bullshit. It's just such a weird misunderstanding of what music and art is."