FR 149: Kara-Lis Coverdale on Dirt, Heat, and Otherworldly Sounds
After a long break, the Canadian musician is back—and more productive than ever.
A conversation with Kara-Lis Coverdale isn’t easily transcribed. There’s a musical quality to the way she talks that doesn’t necessarily scan on the page. Not just her intonation, or the way she frequently breaks into laughter; even the shape of her sentences resembles a pianist feeling out a melody at the keyboard. You can sense her composing her ideas as she speaks them—following a line, testing out a word or a change of direction, repurposing familiar images in new ways.
Or maybe I only think that because that’s also how I hear her playing on A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever, the solo piano album the Canadian musician released last fall—a record that, in its elegant unpredictability, moves much like thought itself.
Incredibly, A Series of Actions was just one of three albums Coverdale released last year, all on Smalltown Supersound. It had been eight years since her last release, the 23-minute mini-LP Grafts, for Boomkat Editions, and a decade since Aftertouches, her last full solo album. But in 2025, the floodgates opened.
First, in May, came From Where You Came, a wide-ranging collection of electronic and electroacoustic studies that she had written and recorded in multiple places over the years, and further developed in live performance. Five months later she returned with A Series of Actions, which I was fortunate enough to see her perform at Unsound in October, first playing the suite of nocturnes unaccompanied, then conducting the Sinfonietta Cracovia in a series of string arrangements of her work. Finally, in late November, she altered course yet again with Changes in Air, a meditative album of piano, modular synthesizer, and electronic organ that was adapted from her soundtrack to an installation at Oslo’s Skarven, a floating sauna complex in the middle of the Oslofjord.
The three records are so distinct that it would be easy to imagine them as the work of three completely different artists, but spend enough time with them and the commonalities reveal themselves: chief among them a sense of patience, a determination to listen to the sounds as she makes them, and let them lead her where they may.
I spoke with Coverdale last month over Zoom, catching a glimpse of her cosy, wood-walled studio, where she sat flanked by keyboards, harp, and even what I’m pretty sure was a harpsichord, before the unstable internet connection resigned us to turning off our cameras and resorting to voice only. We spoke at length about her prolific year as well as the reasons for the long break that preceded it, touching on subwoofers, saunas, gardening, and more.
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Good morning! That’s a very cozy looking studio.
It is cozy.
So where are you now? You’re at home in Ontario?
I’m at home in Ontario. It’s a small village called St. George, so it’s super cute, very quiet. That’s where I am for the rest of the year.
Nice. How much time of the year do you typically get to spend there?
Quite a bit, actually. Although this year I’ve been traveling a lot, so I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a very typical schedule of being here or not. Being here seems to be in flux all the time. As it goes. Being an artist, I guess.
Was that your destination when you left Montreal back in 2017?
It was more or less this area in Ontario where I grew up, more or less, kind of bouncing around these outskirts. It’s not quite GTA, but I guess it’s in the greater Toronto area, as it’s known these days. I’m about an hour from the airport, west of Toronto. So that was my destination, and then I was looking for a place on my own, and that was kind of a mission, because it was COVID and the chaos and inflation was insane here during that time. Pretty crazy times for everybody.
What made you opt for something more rural over the city?
Oh my God, I am a country person. I mean, I grew up in the country, so it just feels very natural and I’m comfortable here. The city’s a lot of information for me, and when I go there, I kind of feel a little stunned. I’m better with it now, actually a lot better. But it used to be a lot of information to read, and that kind of made me paralyzed. It’s a good balance I’ve struck now, where I can come here and have my feet on ground, really communing with a space that is fixed. It’s super important for me. I love working in dirt, so that’s pretty much it. I need places where there’s dirt.
Do you have a garden there?
I do, yeah, I do. It’s been a huge project, actually. I’ve worked in landscaping almost my whole life. It’s been my job that got me through school and stuff in addition to music, so I’ve designed a lot of gardens and built a lot of gardens. My garden here is completely native, so it’s been super fun building my first native garden. It’s different growing up in areas that are already wilded. An older perspective in landscaping is that we called a lot of those species “weeds” and then replaced them with cultivated plants. There’s been a huge movement in wilding spaces and landscape culture. So transforming this lot from what it was—it was more or less a lot of grass and this old pool that was on it, and I dismantled the whole thing and relocated that to a nearby town for this family. And then just kind of filling this area with plants I grew from seed, got from different wilding nurseries around, and kind of built this wild bird sanctuary, I guess you could call it. Birds and bugs. There’s so many bugs, an incredible amount of bugs. That’s been amazing to watch. There’s so much life. It’s hard to put into pictures because it kind of looks like a mess, but the life and the feeling of being around these spaces is so… Wow. And even the sound, these little bugs and worms, and it’s really amazing.
I remember when we first started working in the garden at our house, just digging and getting to know the soil, I was just blown away by the quantity of life just crawling through the dirt, like beetles and weird worms and strange larvae that you couldn’t identify. It’s amazing.
It is amazing. Also, the soil that you get versus the soil you can create is really interesting. Yeah, it’s a whole practice, it goes so deep. Very therapeutic too.
It is therapeutic, just to be outside and see the seasons change, seeing how everything morphs over the course of the year. Now that we’ve been here for a few years, you start becoming familiar with the cycles. Like, OK, these plants are coming in now, but the turtles haven’t hibernate yet, so that’s making us curious. Shouldn’t they be asleep by now?
Wow, turtles? So you have water there too?
We have a cistern that captures rainwater, and this year we want to start using that, but until now we’ve done no irrigation at all, just a light watering of the garden, but that hasn’t really been enough. This year we want to try to optimize the way we use the rainwater, because the island is in pre-drought conditions.
Yeah, water is an issue in the garden.
Very much so, though I would assume that in Canada water isn’t a problem. But maybe I’m wrong?
We have a lot of freshwater in Canada generally, and especially in this area—it depends on where you are and it depends on the year. There was quite a bit of drought this year and especially towards the end of the summer, so the leaves didn’t turn those vibrant classic Ontario colors that we normally get. Instead, everything just sort of browned and dropped quite early. So that was interesting. It really depends. But my garden, I didn’t water it once this year because it’s native, so it just does its thing and doesn’t require any maintenance at all really. And I didn’t put in vegetables this year because, well, I was really busy with music, so I didn’t have much time to do it. Vegetables, they take a lot of work. You have to be there all the time, and it’s nice to have plants that create berries and things without really needing to care for them.
Do you have berry plants?
We have a mulberry that I thought was just a huge, crazy sucker weed. They are quite invasive in this area. They sprout up sucker plants all the time, so I had to take a few mulberries out, but I had no idea what it was when we moved in, and then the next spring I saw that it had these amazing berries on it. The entertainment of this tree is just a hundred—the squirrels and everything, the life on it and all the different birds. It’s so fun. It’s the best tree.
Oh wow. That’s cool.
Yep, yep. And then serviceberries also. Serviceberries are really underrated.
Serviceberries?
Yeah, very underrated. Ontario native tree, super lovely tree. You know that book Braiding Sweetgrass that was very successful a few years ago? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s next book after Braiding Sweetgrass actually has something to do with serviceberries. I was glad to see that it’s getting its time in the sun.
I could talk about your yard all day, but dive into your current projects. Obviously it’s pretty unusual to put out three albums in a year; was that a conscious plan ahead of time or did it just sort of unfold as it happened?
It was sort of conscious. As we were preparing, as I was working with Smalltown Supersound and figuring out what this record would be, they were very much wanting an electronic project from me, and I was sort of feeling beyond that moment at the time. I was working on other things, like the piano record and other acoustic projects, things for orchestra, things for film, all sorts of stuff, and pulling from my vault to figure out what was going to be next. I guess we had many projects that I was finishing sort of at the same time, in terms of mastering and mixing, and kind of carving out a few different projects, and they just kind of came to a close around the same time, more or less within a year. So we had them sort of lined up.
I actually wanted the piano record to come first and then it just didn’t, the heavy electronic one came first, and then around, I don’t know, late May, a few weeks, maybe even a month after From Where You Came was released, we just decided, yeah, there’s going to be three this year, let’s just get them all out. Which was great for me and a huge relief, because I felt a little behind in terms of releasing things. It was just a bit of a dam. I was trying to be patient, because there was a lot of infrastructure that needed to be in place. I was sorting out my publishing and all sorts of boring technical stuff, admin stuff, the realities of making all this work in a way that is going to, I don’t know, let this thing have legs—or some sort of roots, not legs; roots is a better way to put it—in a way that kind of allowed the records to just exist for a long period of time. I mean, I’m always creating things, so for me, I’m like, OK, I’m ready. It’s coming out. And then everyone else is like, no, no, no, hold on. You have to do this.
Yeah, it was quite a delay. Your last album came out in 2017, if I’m not mistaken. So you were creating that whole time?
Yes. There was maybe a year where I was almost exclusively working on infrastructure stuff and learning all about publishing and all that kind of stuff. And I applied for grants for the first time. I’d been super resistant to any sort of assistance in a really ridiculous way that I regret now.
Why? Why were you resistant to it?
Maybe it’s just the way I’ve been raised, but I feel like being self-sustaining has been very important to me as a value. And also exercising all my skill in a way that creates some sort of… something like an egg. Like, an egg is an egg and it’s sort of complete in and of itself. It’s like a complete protein. It’s also potentially a baby. I don’t know. It’s just like an egg is an egg and I wanted my work, in terms of producing and composing it and recording it and mixing it myself—I don’t know, I’ve just been obsessed with some sort of verity or veritas in that process, actually creating it from all sides.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
And seeing what that sounds like while also being aware of trying to, from an economics point of view, make the work actually move between people in a way that is self-sustaining rather than requiring government assistance or something like that. It’s really hard when you’re making weird, esoteric music, but I guess that I’ve always felt like this music isn’t really that weird and it isn’t that strange, and to some degree I think that that rings true, but maybe I have been naive in the sense of, oh yeah, it takes time for language to catch up. There’s some period of normalization that needs to take place for new musical languages to really catch on in ways that are comprehensible. I think about the first time I heard the Flying Lotus record, forever ago, and how weird it sounded, and then I checked it out the other day and I’m like, it’s not weird.
Yeah. Things become normalized in our brains.
Yes. So I guess part of why I wanted to resist the help is just that I was stubborn in the sense that, this will work, this will work. Just sort of trusting in the climate in some way. And then I changed my mind because I was struggling so much. And working so much and never being able to support myself completely. So at some point you kind of have to make a few concessions. I’ve had to learn that asking for help is not really a weakness.
No. Especially if you live in Canada, where help exists, as opposed to some places.
Yes, it does exist, and so I should use it.
Let’s talk about those three records in some detail. The first one you released, From Where You Came, spans different moments and different places. It incorporates work at the GRM in Paris, in the electronic music studio in Stockholm. What was the process like of integrating those disparate moments and making sense of them as a coherent album?
All these different experiences and residencies and creation moments are definitely linked by sound systems. At the time I was really obsessed with, and exclusively working in, powered music. So when I say sound system, I just mean amplified music, or music that is two XLRs you’re plugging in and you kind of bring this world with you. And the idea of amplifying really intimate moments—just amplifying, basically. It’s amplified music, it’s sound system music, and so I was moving around playing live a lot and traveling a ton and just sort of working on these pieces on the road, and those challenges were what brought it together. I still think this record is mostly just a live record in ways that it was made to be. “Freedom,” for instance, really makes no sense when it comes on Spotify. Even now I’m like, OK, that doesn’t really make sense, but live, it’s meant to be a hundred decibels, so you’re feeling things that you don’t really feel at your desk. There’s so much sub that you’re only getting such a small part of that. I don’t even think you get any of that experience at your desk, or when you’re listening in your headphones.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought of “subwoofer” as one of the first terms that I associated with your music.
Oh yeah. There’s so much sub in that record. You don’t hear it at home because it’s such a physical component. So it’s a document of that time in a way that I wasn’t willing to let go of, even though I knew that it wouldn’t really translate, per se. Maybe that was sort of selfish to release it as a record, but I think it’s important and I didn’t want it to disappear.
I was really interested in your use of dissonance. It crops up in a couple of different places, but especially in “Problem of No Name.” I feel like there’s an unsettling undercurrent through a lot of the pieces that doesn’t let you get too comfortable. It keeps you a little bit on edge.
Yeah, I mean, I was struggling a lot in this time, emotionally. I had more or less given up everything in my life for music. I had moved out of an apartment, I broke up with my boyfriend. I was supposed to move to New Zealand, and I didn’t… [laughs] It was an extreme life change and I think I was dealing with it while trying to—I knew that I needed to completely dedicate myself to my work, because I knew that was what my life was supposed to be, but also had this relationship and a normal life, to some degree, and I just sort of abandoned all that quite quickly and did what I had to do. [laughs] And so while I was trying to be strong or whatever and follow my academic pursuits and just explore a live extension of my academic work, I guess it just came through. I was so messed up emotionally that I think I was notating that. I mean, when you’re working with electronics in this way, you’re able to articulate these states really clearly. For a while it was difficult for me to reperform them because each time I was reperforming, it was reactivating that emotional pain.
When you’re composing, are you entering into an expressive emotional state?
From Where You Came? For sure. I was using music as a portal to be honest with myself about how I was feeling and kind of dump it there, rather than using music as, say, a way out of that. It was just a document, like a journal entry. It’s not performing an idea or anything in that sense. That music is very real-time. So it’s unique in that sense. Changes in Air is very different. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is very different. But From Where You Came is kind of like a journal in that sense.
Given that, there are some really interesting curveballs on From Where You Came. I was thinking about the song “Daze”—it sounds almost like pop, for lack of a better word, at least compared to the more abstract or atmospheric pieces. I hadn’t listened to the album in a while, and when “Daze” came on, I was like, man, what a hook! If I had heard it out of context, I’m not sure I would have associated it with you.
Yeah, I think “Daze” is kind of having fun, like I’m flying around, imagining myself in a wingsuit or something. I mean, I have a really vivid imagination, so there’s a lot of fantastical elements in this record. It’s kind of epic, also, in many ways. I was on this journey out in the world, experiencing a lot of new stuff, and a lot of the times it was amazing and fun, and “Daze” is one of those moments where that was one of the best parts of the decision I had made. Just enjoying that, being able to do what I want. “Daze” always feels like that to me—it’s just so unconcerned, in a way.
Let’s talk about A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever, the solo piano record. You said you initially wanted that one to come first—had you finished it before From Where You Came? Or were you working on them in parallel?
For the most part, A Series of Actions was written after From Where You Came. I was sort of finishing up From Where You Came and a lot of the project files had become corrupt, and it took me weeks. From Where You Came is such a technical record, and such a nightmare to make, in an OCD sense. It’s a beast of a record. There’s so many notes, so many ideas, so many melodies—there’s so much in it. It was just kind of a crazy thing to wrap up. A Series of Actions is almost the opposite. I wrote it in one spot. I wrote it initially to have electronics and piano, but then I stripped back all the electronics over time. So it’s a very static work, with this idea of one—from one place, with one timbre and one instrument. Refining things until they’re in their most fundamental state.
So there was a whole electronic component you stripped away?
Yes. During the writing process, there was quite a bit of electronic stuff, and the more time I spent with it, the more I worked on the piece, there were many different iterations, but it just felt like I really needed something that was completely out of the box and off grid and completely of my body and not of a programming realm. Because From Where You Came, it’s so incredibly programmed, it’s very cerebral to work on, and A Series of Actions is just kind listening and playing, and that’s all.
How much of A Series of Actions is composed and how much is improvised?
I mean, define “improvised” and define “composed.” It’s not like I was sitting down and writing notes on paper. I was very much writing at the keyboard—writing ideas and then refining them, whittling them down, replaying them. So improvisations become compositions. But then there are some parts that I would almost qualify as cadenzas, certain areas that are more freeform. When I’m playing them live, I know that there’s a section here that I can play with a little more than other sections that are more square and rhythmical. So it plays with those two dimensions of more mechanical, clock-like structures and then more biological structures, like bird flight, or a limb against the sky, and its crooked dimensions. These sorts of comparisons or contrasts exist in that work.
Did you have any particular musical influences in mind when you were writing those pieces?
Probably Arvo Pärt, if anything. I always come back to Arvo. Well, not always, but here and there. Arvo, Debussy…
I guess I asked, because it made me think of Frederic Mompou’s Musica Callada a bit, and he’s always been a favorite of mine. So I was happy to hear what sounded like an echo of that.
An echo. I’ll have to look that up.
I’ll send it to you. It’s great.
Yes, please. Also, though it wasn’t conscious in my mind, on reflection, Bartok’s Mikrokosmos has had a huge impact on me. I don’t know if you know this work, but it’s a collection of eight books of studies, more or less, of different musical forms that are deceptively simple. I remember studying them in school and really being mind-blown. There’s a constellation-like nature to those works. They’re almost like architectural drawings, quite simple structures, but you can kind of elaborate them out of these small fragments. That approach really inspires me still.
Something I was struck by in the Bandcamp description, the press release, was the way you talked about the importance of the piano decay in those pieces.
There was a major desire for space and listening. I mean, I always crave silence. It’s just something that I always want. During the writing of this record, I was in such a deep period of reflection that I almost didn’t speak for weeks. Just being and not speaking was so… It seemed like the only thing, in order to erase [laughs]... Maybe not erase, but just to find a place of being, of pure being that wasn’t performative in any way or wasn’t expressive in any particular way. It was simply a space of listening to mechanic in a way that that mechanic itself guided the action, rather than any idiom or preexisting emotional sentiment. I think the writing of A Series of Actions was quite empty in that sense. Some people hear an emotive quality in there, which I find interesting, but it’s definitely not something I intentionally put it in. I was in quite an empty space, in that sense, when I wrote it.
Obviously, if you take a sort of lyrical solo piano record, many people are going to say that it’s emotive, expressive, all these kinds of things. So it’s interesting that you were in a very different headspace in creating that record.
I think I was just so focused on harmonic arrangement, which guides even From Where You Came and all of my work—simple things, like in a sequence of five notes, will the third note be slightly greater velocity than the second note in order to create a phrase between the second and third. It’s all about velocity, sequence—quite musical concerns.
Right. The musical language is the expressive language. That makes perfect sense.
Yes, yes. Like From Where You Came, there’s a lot of will in that record, trying to use the music to get to another place, or getting up with it or articulating a down, which is like… You know, it’s all energy in motion, and these are quite physical, embodied ideas that can be put into music, but A Series of Actions is not like that at all. It’s just action, decay, sustain, release. [laughs]
What’s it like to perform the Series of Actions pieces?
It’s been amazing, actually. It’s been really interesting. I think it has to do with the unplugged nature of these shows, but a lot of the sound system work—it’s been so loud, and I’d been working in a loud space for a while, and I was so exhausted from loud music that returning to something that’s so quiet and fine, and working with really primary dimensions of acoustics, again, has been quite grounding. And the silence of the shows and the general response has been really moving, in that everyone seems to hold these spaces together. There’s pin-drop silence, often, between the phrases and the pieces. There’s been a lot of really emotional feedback, people having really deep experiences with it, and it’s been super interesting. But in terms of my experience playing it, it’s been super sustainable, more than a lot of the recent electronic work. The electronic work is very powerful and sometimes I have no idea how I made it, and it’s kind of beyond myself in a bizarre, transcendent way, but there’s something so immediate and ephemeral and of the hand, and connected to me and place, with the piano work that just feels really great. And I really enjoy changing the works live, as well, and working with them in a really manageable way. There’s just a real presence there that it doesn’t feel squirrelly like electronic music does sometimes, where it’s like you’re juggling a lot of stuff. It’s super virtuosic in that sense.
You mentioned the pin-drop silences, and that reminded me how much I loved the fact that when you played at Unsound, nobody applauded in between the pieces, which was such a delight, because you got to just absorb into the sort of long form of it, rather than take it in bursts. It was so gratifying that everybody in the space understood that it wasn’t done yet.
Applause has always been really complicated for me. When it’s appropriate and when it’s not appropriate is something I think about. With competitive music and quote-unquote concert music, there’s this entertainment element—you’re showing something, or you’re being a performer in this sort of, I did a trick, now applaud, kind of way. But then in sacred traditions, you’re offering something that isn’t designed to be a show trick. It’s something that’s so attached to the core of your spirit that it’s not in any way funny or an achievement. It’s just so honest in its entire being, it’s not meant to be entertainment.
Right.
And yeah, sometimes you might want to clap, but also at the end of a lot of these performances, there’s such a release that you’re in another place physically, and then to come to that rather rehearsed habit of the applause… it’s a different state.
Yeah, it breaks the spell. Totally.
Yes. Yeah.
Well, I will say the one thing that I did find very entertaining and even fun was when you got up from the piano and during your final piece: The orchestra had been filing in very quietly, and you stride over to the podium and pick up the baton and then start conducting them. That was so unexpected. I had just assumed they would be accompanying you. I didn’t know you had trained as a conductor, so it was really delightful to see that, in addition to enjoying the orchestral version of your music.
Oh, good! I mean, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be entertained. [laughs] Or enjoy ourselves. I mean, I think enjoyment is the goal, in some ways. I don’t know. I am not sure what the goal is actually. [more laughter]
Maybe we could talk a little bit about Changes in Air, the most recent album, because it sounds like it has a really interesting genesis. It’s a piece for electric organ, modular synthesis, and piano, and it was adapted from an installation based on a sauna. Can you describe that installation?
Yeah! So I have a long background with saunas. Everyone in my family has built their own sauna. It’s something we all do together with friends.
Is this an Estonian thing?
It’s very much an Estonian thing. So I’ve had this my whole life. And I was speaking to some friends about how I would love to—because the aural world of the sauna is really rich. As the stove heats, you can hear temperature changes that are audible in the metal. There’s a lot of rhythmic qualities that are really recognizable and repeatable. It’s a language. You can hear temperature and you can hear fluctuation in the materials around you in this really contained, extreme environment. So I’ve been super interested in that thermodynamic language and been studying Kiel Moe and other architects who deal with thermodynamics and architecture. And combining that with this idea of endurance that as a sauna practitioner I’ve found really interesting. Of pushing through difficult moments, and the physical challenge of concentration required being in these extreme situations, and how that can carry over into other areas of your life as sort of a poetic metaphor.
So I had mentioned to a curator friend that I’m really interested in exploring this further, and then they had set me up with Skarven in Oslo to create this installation on the Oslofjord. So I traveled there and studied the space and wrote this piece for a two-hour experience overlooking the fjord. It was just so fun to write and right up my alley. I really love this work because it exists beyond that installation as well. There’s a lot of scientific thought that I’ve put into it, but it also just sort of flows as music.
It’s wonderful. I love the album, and it’s such a nice and interesting complement to the other two albums. Obviously the textures are wonderful: organ, modular synthesis, piano—the three things work so nicely together. And it also really evolves. I never know where it’s going, which is a quality I always enjoy in music. What you said about endurance is really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a sauna, so I wasn’t aware that was part of it.
I think of it almost as sonic envelopes in a way, actually. So they’re evolving and your body is like… Yeah, please try, and get back to me. But as you’re enduring, and enduring is really the word here, it requires a certain meditative state, or meditative capability, that you’re in there and training yourself to be calm to a point where you can pass through this difficult moment, and then you can reach different levels. Once you pass through one level, you can go to the next level, but you have to calm your mind so that you can be there.
It sounds a lot like endurance running.
Yeah, absolutely. But you’re not running at all. [laughs]
Right, it’s sort of the opposite, in that sense.
But it does get your heart rate up a lot though. But I think that those meditative qualities, you can also use them to pass through physical pain, all sorts of other difficult situations. It’s like a similar apparatus of the mind. But then the music is quite another thing, really, like the material reality of the sauna, the material reality of thermodynamics. It’s another thing. It’s some winter stuff!
Great interview. Some of these answers - especially the one on silence - read like excerpts from Clarice Lispector.