Biography
Coverdale began studying music and piano at age 5. An improvisational virtuoso at a young age, she had composed and performed her own music before age 10. [1] Her mother is an Estonian visual artist and her father a builder and entrepreneur. She was a competitive pianist until she went to music school at The University of Western Ontario, where she studied piano, composition, and musicology with Gwen Beamish, Omar Daniel, David Myska, and Jay Hodgson. She later studied in the MIT (Media Information Technologies) program. [2] Canadian pianist Ann Southam presented her with the promising young artist award at The Contemporary Music Showcase in Toronto. At Western Coverdale became captivated by the practice of electroacoustic music and began integrating electronics and digital processes into her work. The Kurzweil K2500 was the first sampler she ever worked with. Her Masters thesis is a study of timbre and realism in recorded music which addresses how "reality" is constructed through sound design and recording technology. [3]
Since age 13, Coverdale has been the organist and music director at several churches across Canada. [4] Sacred music is an influence in her acoustic composition work, as is Estonian choral and folk music. She claims to be a saturationist, and says Napster has been one of her biggest influences. [4]
Tours
Kara-Lis Coverdale is a dynamic international touring performance artist, having headlined concert halls, festivals, and clubs throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, and opening tours for acts such as Big Thief and Caribou. She has also been part of the Floating Points Promises Ensemble with Shabaka Hutchings, and the Konoyo Gagaku Ensemble. Coverdale has received outstanding reviews for her solo performances in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, Wire, Crack Magazine, and more. In 2016/17, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, [5] Semibreve [6] , and Mutek. [7] Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered, technically rigorous, and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.
She has earned praise from Arvo Pärt (she also appears in the documentary "That Pärt Feeling" by Paul Hegeman), Brian Eno, and several other artists. She is one of the only artists to open a solo show for Death Grips, in Köln at Stadtgarden in 2016. In 2018 and 2019, Kara-Lis was a member of the Konoyo Ensemble, in support of Tim Hecker's project of the same name. In 2017 Coverdale partook in the 17th edition of the Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam, exploring the theme of The Noise of Being.
Notable records
Grafts
Grafts explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Grafts has been described as an “arresting” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty,” and won widespread critical acclaim, earning top album of the year in 2017 recognition from CRACK, Boomkat, Resident Advisor, Noisey, Gorilla vs Bear, NPR, Tiny Mix Tapes, The Quietus, Adhoc, and more.
Aftertouches
Aftertouches is often described as part of a new school of enterprising electronic artists that lean heavily into electronic adventuring, both conceptually and sonically, "as if to experiment with the very building blocks of musical beauty... to speak a language that not everyone speaks yet" (Adam Harper, The Fader). [9] Compared to its experimentalist contemporaries, Aftertouches approaches experimentalism with a more symphonic calculation and leaning towards composition, weaving both physical and technological realms to creates a series of celestial modern classical miniatures. The Wire describes Aftertouches as "...the textless, fleshless voice-keyboard, the lingering foggy sublime of CPU-washed tone granules, the modular serialism of object oriented processes. The various parts are often starkly separated in colour and harmony, but the overall shape flows on smoothly either still learning from and resolving its experiences, or in thrall to an aesthetic that's beyond the horizon" (The Wire, issue 376, June 2015). [2] For Adhoc, Neil Lord writes "The sweeping moments of beauty are balanced with stabs of electronic grit: an acrylic portrait of a Cronenberg-esque organism, morphing, half human, half machine." [10] Aftertouches was named one of the best 25 records of the first half of 2015 by Adhoc, and was called "a true masterwork from a still young artist" by Bobby Power in Decoder. [10] [11]
A 480
In 2013 Coverdale released a series of vocal pieces called A 480 that "index the nature of the voice in the age of data." A 480 is accompanied by .nfo scores (an .nfo is a hacker scene release that accompanies a crack), which contain 'information about the sources of the A 480 audio texts, transformation procedures used to arrange and compose them into their present form, and keyword routes of re-creation." She calls them "bad scores" in the sense that they "do not offer performer the clearest instructions to produce an exact re-creation of the composer's authoritative creation... an .nfo score is more like a treasure map than an inclusive set of rules." The virtual chorales of A 480 comprise compositions of actual recorded singers that have been unpersonally sourced, downloaded, then disembodied, disfigured, and displaced over forty times, then arranged into temporally affected four-part fugues. [12] "The pre-composed voices are curationally divided into short loops of different lengths in MAX and played at different speeds across 4 different channels. Slight temporal variations fade in and out over time in constant flux, occasionally pausing for immersion in a pulse chamber before it moves onto another. The length of the looped samples are adjusted one at a time— lengthened and shortened, and at times switched out altogether, to reveal how seemingly minute temporal variations have impactful effects on overarching rhythm, melody, and energy." [13]
List of Works
"VoxU" (Montreal, Mutek 2017), was premiered at Mutek Montreal and was described by Exclaim to "set the precedent for aspiring experimental artists to come". [14]
"PICL," (Solo Piano, Creamcake, Berlin, 2017)
"Marjamaa Laulud," (Opera, Dance, and Theatre company, Theatre Vanemuine, Tartu ES, 2017)
"Shadow Encounter" (Pipe Organ, Berlin Jazz Festival, 2018)
"Wood Has Memory" (Pipe Organ, Issue Project Room, 2018)
"Grand Exorcism" (Electronics and Pipe Organ, Gesu, Montreal, RBMA, 2018)
"Music for Skarven" (Sound Installation Oslo, 2019)
"Aftertouches Acoustic" (Chamber Orchestra, Contemporaneous Ensemble, 2021)
"Washington Baths" (Sound installation, Maine, 2023)
"Light Music" (Violin and Electronics, Berlin, 2022)
"Patterns in High Places" (Solo violin, Christopher whitley, 2023)
"Sol" (Choir, Ludens Choir, 2023).
"Composite Matter" (Chamber Orchestra, Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, 2024)
"Endocrine" (Cello Octet, Cello Octet Amsterdam, 2024)
"A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever" (Solo Piano, Smalltown Supersound, 2025)
"Three Body Illumination" (Pipe Organ, Braga 25, 2025)
"Primary Action at a Distance" (Quantum Sound installation, Berlin Kraftwerk, 2025)
