Art via Evan Solano
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
In 2017, Kara-Lis Coverdale — a composer with one foot in Ontario, another in Estonia, and a head in the stars — released Grafts, a 22-minute galaxy in miniature. The record, which blurs the lines between mid-20th-century post-minimalism, late-20th-century progressive-electronic records, and early-21st-century electroacoustic explorations, was about as close as you could get to synthesizing Coverdale’s practices. Just don’t call it “ambient.” Off the back of that release, she could have gone just about anywhere.
And yet, in the wake of Grafts, Coverdale more or less dropped off the face of the earth: she packed her bags for a series of performances and, in the process, disappeared. “I was kind of homeless and on the road for years,” Coverdale told POW over a recent Zoom call. “I went on tour and didn’t come back.”
That time on the road, a time defined by grief and reckoning with demons, was made all the more disorienting by function of where Coverdale found herself: a modern classical-music composer performing at rave nights, competing for eyes and ears with all manner of experimental-music heavyweights. At these events, Coverdale says she “went to places that were simply unsafe, musically.”
Eight years after the release of Grafts, Coverdale released From Where You Came. It’s her first LP in nearly a decade, informed by that time off: it is a reckoning with what she calls “soundsystem music and full-spectrum music.” Taken from one angle, its wall-of-sound approach to acoustics, frequently gentle but never relenting, are like a deep sigh played loud enough to level an apartment stack. It’s a counterpoint to 3-a.m. club sets. At the same time, if you play this thing loud enough, it might just offer the same kind of transportation.
That LP, it turns out, was just the start. In the months that followed, she released A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever and Changes in Air, a pair of records whose relative austerity make From Where You Came sound like a veritable windstorm. With A Series of Actions, Coverdale says, she wanted to “return to classical mechanics where there’s very fixed limitations,” engaging with the piano as a mechanical object first and foremost. Changes in Air, by contrast, makes its sound, dimly luminescent droners for modular synthesizers, organ, and piano, apparent from the title on down.
In early November, we had a chance to sit down with Coverdale over Zoom, exploring all manner of nooks and crannies of her practice: her relationship with classical-music studies; the link between Bartók and geology; her distinctions between the physical and digital worlds; re-creating traumas; months spent mute; and much more.
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)