“Too Human to be Truly Ambient”: An Interview with Kara-Lis Coverdale
We reach into the void with composer Kara-Lis Coverdale to break down the emotional and physical process behind her sprawling records.
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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.)
You started playing piano when you were quite young. How did that come to you?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: My family is very musical. Communication is a song, in a way. Estonian, my first language, is very tonal. It's almost like Japanese in the sense that there's a lot of tonal information in the language, more so than English. There's a dynamic and highly poetic quality to the language.
I was brought up with folk music — Estonian folk music, especially — from my mother, who always sang in choirs. Folk music was always around, and she was always singing and teaching us songs. My uncle played accordion, and he's an architect. Ike is in a folk band. Music is more of a way of life than an occupation, per se.
There was a piano at the house. I wanted to play it; I asked my mom for lessons. She said, “No, you have to wait until you're five.”
I have this vivid memory of her finally taking me for my first lesson on my fifth birthday. We lived in a very small village, and there was a piano teacher around the corner. We walked there with these books that had been given to my brother by my aunt so that he could learn, but he didn't really have interest.
It was a big [deal], like: “You have to wait until your birthday!” It was very serious. There was a formal component to it: “This is a privilege that you’re going to be learning this, and you have to take it seriously.” That was my first lesson.
How did you find your way towards classical music, broadly speaking? And, when you did, what did that term mean?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: In Canada, we have the Royal Conservatory of Music. The RCM is a national music school with a main performance center with a concert hall in downtown Toronto. It's an institution that you pay into to access the curriculum and examinations that take place in satellite centers across the country. It's a rigorous and structured curriculum split up into different areas: You learn works from four lists — A, B, C, D — that represent musical periods chronologically. You have your Baroques, and then your classical, and then your romantics [and] 20th-centuries. I’d say “classical” education simply meant there was a standard of rigour and breadth to undertaking the study of music; it wasn’t a reference to music of the classical period per se. “Classical” just meant an expectation of skill and understanding.
What’s the full span of that timeline?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Not that far back. They could have gone further, but usually 18th century. 1600 was probably the earliest. We weren't doing medieval music until much later. Adjacent classes in history, theory, harmony, and counterpoint move in tandem with your studies, so it isn’t until a later point when a student is adjudicated on music that's from before Christ, or whatever. This was a Western program.
It was rather comprehensive but not comprehensive enough. I think it's changed now. I keep meaning to look and see how they've accommodated the idea of the Western canon, because I didn't understand it as something that was critiqued as being a very narrow understanding of music until University.
It's difficult to describe [that critique] to a child. But I think the gesture can be simple to instill: all you have to do is be more inclusive of the types of music that are in that book. But it's dependent on [the] population, on who's going there, on who's doing the studies and all these things. There were lots of Chinese composers and Japanese composers in these books. The composers were from all over — you have Hungarian and Argentinian musics.
I really gravitated towards Argentinian music, especially [in] grades nine or ten.
What drew you towards that?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: The energy. The passion. This sense of chaos. Asymmetrical phrasing and odd time signatures. And the harmonies are really different: you have these open fourths and fifths, and weird successions, and strange glissandi, and weird percussion. I knew throughout my entire young education that I liked to play with material more than regurgitate it. I wasn't particularly the type that would excel in period-piece performances. I wouldn't prefer to go up and play a Bach piece [as] urtext; to play it as Bach “intended” it, like with Henle Editions. I’d rather create something new out of it. I already had that improvisational intuition at a really young age.
How does improvisation color your practice?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: So much. I often think of composition as a series of micro-improvisations that are arranged in some way. Once you get a bunch of them, you scale back and see what you've done. Some works have a greater degree of it than others. With Aftertouches, I was indexing works that were preexisting and my own idea on them. From Where You Came is truly new, in the sense that I wasn’t really attempting to be part of an existing conversation.
Do you consider your contemporary work to be in conversation with “classical music?”
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Sort of. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is most directly, as of late. I've observed with curiosity some of the reviews that have come in to see what parallels people draw. There's been mention of Satie, Ravel, Chopin, Cage, Sakamoto, and Pärt. Someone with the orchestra I was just working with said, “You’re so Chopin." I was like, [mutters] “I don’t think I am.” But I blushed. Chopin is the pianist’s pianist.
But I really said “I don’t think I am” because in A Series of Actions, I am highly resistant to engaging emotion, or at least as much as possible. I'm avoiding engaging emotion, because From Where You Came is all about energy in motion. It’s an unbridled idea of: we are alive, and life is chaos, and it’s hard. All of it’s in there. I think that openness to everything, and wanting to be in dialogue with everything, and feeling everything — it burned me out. As a highly attuned person, that can be a lot of input. So A Series of Actions is a reverse-input: all of these things exist, but we don’t engage.
When working with digital musics, you can be very flippant about defining your own reality. I wanted to return to classical mechanics where there’s very fixed limitations; putting limitations on temperament and timbre, where I’m forced to really engage with the finite parameters of a fixed object.
The instrument as a physical thing.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Yes. A Series of Actions is also about avoiding a lot of what I would call “idioms of cliche” that arise in a lot of piano music. I was attempting to create something new out of the fundamentals, but without going into any patterns that came to me quickly or intuitively. Because of this approach, I find it difficult to go to the piano and recall what A Series of Actions is, as they are almost effacing structures.
Conversely, if you tell me to play, say, Addison Rae, I could play that right now. Those are really recognisable harmonic patterns. There’s immediate understanding, which can be lovely. But A Series of Actions is almost a void in its function. I find playing and hearing the pieces to exist in a space where I don’t need to engage with typical expectations. I come to the pieces clean.
You're making me think of Chick Corea's “Children's Songs.” Are you familiar?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: No!
The songs are both rigorous and straightforward; they’re built upon transposing an individual formal move. In my reading, they understand the piano as a mechanical, not expressive, instrument.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: That's what A Series of Actions is. It's returning to the mechanical “action” of the piano: velocity, order, and objective composition that are extra-human in subject.
This reminds me of Bartók's “Microkosmos.” I remember going over these works in post-tonal theory and studying them in the library in school, finding the endless depth he created with deceptively simple sequences of five [notes]. That work really resonated with me. You go from studying, say, Mozart's “Requiems,” which are so over the top. Everything's in there. But is it more complicated or wonderful than the “Mikrokosmos?”
“Mikrokosmos” is a great title, because these pieces are like looking under a microscope and witnessing another dimension. This reminds me of my former partner who was a geologist, so he was looking at rocks all the time. He’d bring home these amazing images from all-nighters logged on the microprobe: a multi-million dollar imaging machine that was housed in the dusty sub-basement of the department. It's difficult to comprehend just how small the images’ scales were, but they were so incredibly dynamic, rich, and detailed, and just as complex as our own world. It’s like looking at worlds within worlds.
You’ve got a background in liturgical music. Do you notice that practice — either sonic or spiritual — informing your work?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Absolutely. Liturgical spaces are spiritual spaces, but [they are of] an organized type of spiritualism that is generally formed around a calendar. There's a time for rebirth; there's a time for mourning, there’s a time for rising. But the liturgical calendar doesn't necessarily overlap with what might be going on in your own life. It sort of operates outside of it on another continuum that, for me as a young person, felt out of time. That was the disjunct with organized liturgical work — experiencing things that aren't necessarily reflected.
Some of the ideas are universal. Loss, birth, death — all these really intense experiences and ideas. In a congregation, you go through extremes of human experience with a community and practice rituals around them as a way of coping. As an organist, one of my most honored duties is: when someone dies, I provide music for their funeral based on who they are, what they were like in life, or what their values or accomplishments might have been. Forming new work in these contexts was always a challenge and honour.
Even though Estonian was my first language, I didn't necessarily understand a lot of what was going on in the services, so I was left to interpret what was going on. I’d receive cues from gestures, tone, and music. There's a lot of information in the music itself. I think that education is deeply embedded in me.
But beyond the bench of the church, I have spent a lot of time broadening my own practice, in terms of vocabulary and instrumentation and what I have allowed to enter my “sacred space” or “sacred practice” to varying degrees, whether that’s musically, culturally, or conceptually. It has been challenging at times, especially when I was younger. I had a lot of frustration with the conservative components of those institutions. Eventually, I wasn’t able to hold that in anymore. It hit a boiling boiling point where I felt like I had to leave that space. I closed the door on it. But that's part of growing up.
Is there some sort of tension, now, in so much of your work being in some way connected to the church? Frankly, you’ve got a lot of pipe organ work. I wonder if that’s a reimagining of that space.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Historically, yes. I’ve acknowledged it as being good; other times, I've used it in ways that acknowledge it as being frustrating and even destructive. The confines of spiritual law are binding and real, they hold grips on the psyche. That’s a complicated subject, but as a musician, at the end of the day, the most important thing is having a bench to go to. Just having access to an instrument that you ritually return to — a place to exercise your practice — you can get what you need to get out of it. Sometimes, irrespective of all the extramusical stuff that's going on, what's most important is that you're creating something. At the end of any day, that's the most important thing.
[The pipe organ] is an incredible instrument; it sounds great, even though I tend towards the “un-great” sounds [laughs]. There's an entire history of the pipe organ in it being an arms race in creating loudness with theater organs and cathedrals, and this idea of: bigger is better and more powerful. Biggest church, biggest organ, bigger pipes! Let’s blow the top off!
I don’t subscribe to that — the linear idea of bigger being better — at all. I tend to find the most compelling ideas can be the most intimate or vulnerable. One of my favourite organs to this day is a small portative in a chapel in Kitchener. Nevertheless, in my early career, I thought I really needed to compete in volume, especially with being put on stages at festivals where there’s a decibel level you need to hit to get over people and placate them into submission. You needed to play at a certain volume, density, or virtuosity to stun them into seeing something as good or powerful or interesting.
I also think it’s a very hypermasculine idea, traditionally speaking, and it’s tied in with [the histories of] war. Not to say I don’t love experiencing loud and offensive [music] — anyone who’s been to a live performance of mine knows it can get a little crazy. Sometimes, it really feels good to experience that intensity, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, or powerful, or better, or stronger. Part of maturing as an artist, I think, is realizing that there's other ways to draw people in and other ways to be.
I think about a pipe-organ show I attended a few months back. There was a physicality to that performance, but there was also a durational aspect to it. It asked you to come to it.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: It's the same with recorded music. You see this in the mastering process, where you need to meet a certain intensity level. Especially now, with streaming platforms, there’s a minimal threshold where you will be rejected or demonetized if you don’t meet that. The dominance of drone music has contributed to this, in a way, where there’s always a floor to things; it never stops. A Series of Actions has an abundance of space in it, in a way that a classical music record does. It was demonetized by Facebook for its “silence”; it’s honestly been a bit of a nightmare just having this work exist on platforms. It was rejected for “too much silence.” It’s been endless emails with distributors since it was published.
Is it an algorithmic issue?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: They gave me a list of things. First, A Series of Actions is solo-piano instrumental. They said, “The algorithm cannot differentiate between you and another piano.” To me, this means it’s demanding de-standardization. It wants a unique sonic signature. This record is very much not concerned with a unique timbral quality, so I can see why it doesn’t fit into this demand. It doesn’t scream, “This is me.”
It was [also] rejected for being below a certain decibel level. I really need to hear decay in my music, and I really need to have space. I have the musical right to reach the zero point.
Talk to me about From Where You Came. You discussed it in starkly personal terms earlier. What was your mindset coming into that record?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Especially at that time, it was really difficult for me to separate my personal life from the music because for me, music is very personal. It always will be and always has been. From Where You Came is a personal record in the sense that it was contingent on what was going on in my life. I had just gone through a really intense breakup when Grafts came out, and I had moved out of my apartment with no plan to return.
I was kind of homeless and on the road for years. I went on tour and didn’t come back. From Where You Came was born out of that time, and is of that period right after Grafts. It’s almost a historical work for me, because it goes back to ideas from 2018 and things that happened then musically all while I was mourning and struggling through the loss of my relationship. It was very hard for me, for years.
Meanwhile, on the road, I was continuing to develop ideas in digital musics that I had initially approached [in a] quite tongue-in-cheek [way] for Aftertouches. I always felt I was ringing a bell about digitalism. I was never completely comfortable in it.
[I wanted] to return to a more tangible mode of production, but I was never able to reach it because the system my work had fed me into. I was playing a lot of electronic shows. I couldn’t help but experience it as a very cold way of living, and it’s [a] very complicated ecosystem, from a production point of view. Electronic music is not exactly a fluid and embodied way of making sound for me, personally. It can touch you in a very deep way, sonically, but not in the way you touch an acoustic instrument.
You can’t dust off Ableton.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Yeah. The idea of “the digital” was so promising in its initial stages. It seemed so utopic, in the sense that we can share so quickly. There’s an immediacy that’s incredible, and it seemed democratizing. Everything was so fast. Accelerationism was appealing to me, as a female, as I believed it could offer monetary independence or some sort of equality. But in terms of my practice and, by extension, economy, I was almost moving so fast I was like a shooting star, and nothing could ever keep up with me. The music was outside of time. It’s really difficult to describe, but it felt like a hyperfuturistic prison of un-real estate. It felt alienating and so far from the ground to be making that sort of music all the time. I felt so ungrounded after that period.
Grafts and From Where You Came?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Especially From Where You Came. With Grafts, I was pretty grounded. I made it on Earth.
I think I have difficulty parsing whether the composition led to this feeling, or whether it was actually that I was on the road indefinitely. I think they were one and the same — it’s a chicken-and-egg situation. [laughs] [From Where You Came is] very “art-project” in that way, I feel, maybe more than “music” sometimes.
I was trying to see the potential of soundsystem music and full-spectrum music: 20,000 hertz and beyond. I was trying to re-embody through the sound, which is also typical of pipe organ music in its physical potential, of “feeling the sound.” But I have definitely explored the outer limits of digital music now. I’ve gone so incredibly deep; I've gone as far as most people would go for the sake of the art. When From Where You Came finished, I knew I had found and defined the limits of the digital dimension. From Where You Came is a really amazing work in an ontological sense: about the modelling potentials of sound.
And then you move in the opposite direction.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Yeah. It’s extremes. I look forward to finding a balance, somehow. I think extremity is really difficult to sustain. If you can separate your person from the work, that's a really great place to be. Film and commission work has helped, because it requires me to be so completely outside of myself and my own research.
I remember reading about you moving into an old home in Ontario, picking up construction, and working on the home. How was finding a place to settle?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: Life-saving. It was something I really needed to do. I was living on and off in Montreal and elsewhere from 2010-19. COVID was sort of a blessing in disguise for me, because I realized I had to make some decisions and my chapter in Montreal had come to a close. I wanted to be closer to my parents, so I got a truck and went back to Ontario.
Then I worked on a lot of film[s]. I worked on a lot of therapeutic works. I worked on stuff for Wavepaths, creating libraries for psychedelic therapy. Mendel created a system that psychologists and psychiatrists could implement for administering psilocybin and MDMA to their patients, creating environments that were safe for that so they could experience trips in ways that weren’t going to cause extreme psychological damage. It was amazing for me, as well, because it was right up my alley.
They were highly emotive, and I’ve worked so much with the diagnostic animation of emotion It was also fascinating to have a medical professional’s feedback on some of the pieces I’d create. I was fascinated and compelled by the medical idea that a sound could be “unsafe.” [At festivals,] there aren’t many restrictions on what you're offering. People pay to receive whatever you give them. You could create some damage.
I was playing in spaces adjacent to, and often within, experimental corridors of the rave world, working in areas where I think the levels were too high. I went to places that were simply unsafe, musically. I was hurt and, so, I hurt. I felt it might be cathartic to go there, or to express those feelings. I often consider it a badge of accomplishment to offer music that documents an event or idea with a high degree of veritas, because [it’s like] I’m being honest. I thought honesty was the most important thing, artistically, that I could offer to people: creating musical equivalents of real experience[s].
I reconsider this now, because as I was repeating those traumas, it's like Buddha says: whatever you focus on, you become that thing. In acknowledging something, you become it. It’s a weird alchemy that’s really dangerous. So where do we put those negative things that happen? I have this entire body of music that’s pretty fucked up, and I don’t really want to put it into the world because I feel like we don’t need more of that in the world. Repeating them can be damaging. So hearing medical professionals tell me this was really affirming: I needed to hear those things. I don't need to put those things out. They can exist, and I can let them pass under the bridge into the nothingness.
At the same time, it's complicated, because some extremely successful records harness a lot of aggression and chaos and pain. A lot of them [are from] my colleagues. It’s: Is that good? Is that what I'm supposed to be doing? What do people need to hear from me? And what do I need? Focusing on healing myself outside of music seemed to be the answer.
I only knew I was in a lot of emotional pain. It was something I carried for a long time when I was trying to figure out what thread of my identity I was going to share on record next. I also felt this huge pressure to share, because Grafts was widely shared. I didn't feel like I could contain everything that had happened in a record. So much had happened, and the pressure just kept getting more and more intense.
In terms of emotional baggage?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: So much. As someone who's writing that into music all the time, wanting to repeat that — it's like when you hear a wrong note. If you're not feeling right, that's all you hear. Then all you can write is the wrong note. So you have to step back for a bit: “Maybe I don't need to be making music at all right now.”
I had a large silent period: I don’t think I talked for months. I was so burnt out and tired. My ears were physically exhausted. I had inexplicable physical pain. I was tired from listening to so much. I was also confronting significant health issues. A great rest and reset needed to occur. Then, after all these other works, I was like, “Okay. I made it through this incredibly long & fucked up period. Here’s a selection of pieces I’m comfortable sharing.” That became From Where You Came.
I’m always embarrassed putting these things out; it’s so intimate and close to the bone. But with seemingly all my records, it’s interesting hearing the feedback: people hear an immense sense of peace or bliss or something, as though I’m impervious to everything fucked-up in the world, or as if I’m in some perpetual state of calm or extreme well-being.
It kind of blows my mind, because this record is not disconnected from any of that. It might be pieces that I’ve used to get through, but I don’t see them as disconnected or as somehow existing in some fantasy world of blissed-out happiness. They merely make moving through a sea of pain possible. Sam Voltek said recently that some people make the opposite of how they are to create a balance. I think that is often true.
But I also have, historically, had a lot of issues with the idea of beauty. I thought that if someone were to call my music beautiful, that it had a negative connotation. That’s definitely tied to gender.
The world was very different 10 years ago for women creating music. I had to practice what I’d call “extreme masking” when I began touring in order to fit into spaces where there were no other women around, just to survive. It was complicated to have to perform in that way. I was always on edge or being othered. It’s a really fucked-up time to be out there in the world. [laughs] But it’s a lot better now. I have to believe it’s better, and I have to forget the past, to some extent, in order to keep going.
I hear where you’re coming from in terms of the records returning to a poisoned well. Many folks who listen to your music don’t know it as a specific emotional object, though. I wonder if that’s a reasonable expectation.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: [This recalls] when I toured with Big Thief: there are degrees of being tuned in. Their audience is so wide. It’s huge. It’s rock music, which is almost [a] nationalistic language at this point. Some people could not comprehend what was going on; nothing registered. Other people were right in there, with me at every turn.
I used to find it much more disturbing when there’s no understanding at all, but I don’t take it personally anymore. As a younger artist, I would have taken that to mean I didn't do my job properly, or I didn't put enough into it, or I didn't articulate it properly. But I can only offer my best and most articulate work.
In terms of what is healthy for me to repeat: it’s illuminating when others play my works completely, like working with [New York City’s] Contemporaneous Ensemble. I was sitting in the audience, hearing this 18-21-piece ensemble play everything to the note, but also interpreting it. I think it's the way it should be with a lot of my work. I’ve put so much into it that I can’t continue to hold it all.
I was rereading a feature you did with RA in 2019 after Grafts.
Kara-Lis Coverdale: That show was a full-on exorcism. I remember it very clearly: I couldn’t even walk after that show, it was so intense. I was definitely in the throngs of it then.
In the midst of those throngs, you say you felt like you “don’t have a home, right now, in terms of a place I feel like it’s perfect for my music to live.” Do you feel you’ve found that home yet?
Kara-Lis Coverdale: The idea of a “home” is something I’ve thought about a lot. I don't think it's one place as much as I used to think it was.
Musically, it can be in many places, and I am quite multilingual in my music. I'm in tune with pop, but I'm not [a pop musician]. I’m not sure if categorization is a form of home. I've never been comfortable with the term “ambient.” To me, ambient is a very specific type of music; it's historical. To me, “ambience” is something that is almost void of ego. It’s beyond consciousness. I think my music is too human to be truly ambient.
Not having released music for a period, and not being in touch with the public directly or working on press releases — I kind of shut that off for a good while in recent years — coming back, I feel there's a real lack of critical engagement in a way that's shocking and weird. The nuance feels missing. Also, the term “ambient” is everywhere now, and there’s so much music that is categorized as “ambient.” I think we need to be more specific about what we hear and create, even if it might be reductive. I don’t know if there’s a fear of being descriptive. I’m not sure what it is, but I feel like there’s a descriptive lack.
Coming back to this idea of a platform: we tried to submit A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever to the “classical” categories but weren’t permitted to.