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Kara-Lis Coverdale

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Kara-Lis Coverdale, “From Where You Came” (Smalltown Supersound, 2025)

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I was beginning to despair that I may never hear a new Kara-Lis Coverdale album ever again, as it has been eight years since the Montreal-based composer last surfaced with the stellar Grafts EP (the strongest release of her career). This latest release is definitely not what I was expecting as a follow up, however, as it often resembles an ‘80s New Age synth visionary attempting to perform a hypnagogic live soundtrack to a classic Disney fairytale, but a mischievous projectionist spliced in some surprise scenes from a vampire film, a kooky carnival, and a tropical vacation to keep her on her toes.

The fairytale that I envision is quite a unique one though, as the plot that I imagine is that a cool princess in a magic crystal castle emerges every evening to give an eclectic freeform Mellotron concert to an enraptured audience of unicorns and delightful woodland creatures who love every single allusion to 20th century jazz and avant-garde composers or 19th century programmatic music.  Nothing bad or frightening ever happens (aside from the occasional dissonant harmony or viscerally slicing texture) and everyone lives happily ever after.

That is admittedly not stylistic terrain that I ever expected to embrace, but these pieces are so charmingly playful, unpredictably experimental, and full of wonder that I quickly fell in love with this album in spite of myself. Even the darker moments have their share of endearingly wonky bits, as the lurching, gasping, and scraping industrial groove of album highlight “Offload Flip” erupts into a deliriously squirming and jazzy synth solo around the halfway point. 

Elsewhere, the Fourth World-inspired “Daze” suggests something between a Tim Hecker residency in the lounge of an exclusive tropical resort and something you’d hear playing in a New Age bookstore after dark when they bring out the wild stuff (like a secret tape of ayahuasca-fueled Laurie Spiegel improvisations or something). As for the remaining pieces, the evoke everything from a Siren’s fogbank serenade to a newly cured vampire greeting his first sunrise to a dueling synth showdown at a Renn Faire to a slowly deflating brass band being gradually engulfed by a swell of blissed-out synths. In short, this is a memorably fun, inventive, and freewheeling album. It may not much resemble the Kara-Lis Coverdale that I thought I knew, but the current Kara-Lis Coverdale has one hell of a wild and oft-revelatory vision.

Listen here.

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Kara-Lis Coverdale, “A 480” (Constellation Tatsu (2014)/Gate (2021))

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Newly reissued on vinyl on her own Gate imprint, A 480 was Coverdale’s formal debut (originally issued on Constellation Tatsu back in 2014). When I first heard it a few years back, I believed it was not nearly as strong as her breakthrough 2017 EP Grafts, but I have since revised and reversed that opinion as A 480 has its own (very different) flashes of brilliance—they just require a bit more focused listening to reveal themselves. This is both a unique album within Coverdale’s discography and a unique album in general, approximating a slow-burning strain of loop-driven kosmische-style psychedelia assembled from ingeniously manipulated vocal loops.

The album’s brief opener amusingly feels like a targeted assault on my personal sensibility, but the cheerily artificial textures and manic repetition of “A 480 are admittedly quite an effective illustration of the album’s overarching vision. In essence, A 480 was crafted entirely from vocal pieces that have been “unpersonally sourced, downloaded, then disembodied, disfigured, and displaced over forty times.” At various points throughout the album, those vocal loops approximate a human choir, but they far more often sound like a synth album from the ’70s that has been chopped up by an Oval-esque mad genius. 

While both the album’s conceptual basis and its source material are certainly intriguing, what truly matters is that the three pieces at the heart of the album all belong in the headphone album hall of fame (sadly still imaginary at this point). That incredible hot streak begins with the half-heavenly/half-futuristic epic “A 479,” which sounds like it could have been a lost Tangerine Dream or Popul Vuh soundtrack for Solaris. That feat is then followed by the darkly hallucinatory “A 478” and the alternately playful and poignant otherworldliness of “A 477.” Each piece offers its own bit of fiendishly clever compositional sleight of hand, but the thread uniting them all is Coverdale’s virtuosic skill at maintaining a consistent sense of forward motion and structure in an endlessly evolving and oft-gorgeous sea of phase-shifting loops. In the passages where everything clicks fully into place, A 480 feels like an almost supernaturally rich and immersive tour de force of subtle rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic mastery. I cannot believe that this was a debut album.

Samples can be found here.

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Kara-Lis Coverdale, “Grafts” (Boomkat Editions, 2017)

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This Montreal-based composer/producer/church organist has been quite hard to miss over the last several years, collaborating on Tim Hecker’s Virgins album, releasing a cassette on one of my favorite tape labels (Sacred Phrases), and garnering much critical praise with her 2015 collaboration with LXV (Sirens). For her latest release, she joins the Boomkat Editions series with this brief one-sided vinyl EP. 

I am not normally a fan of gimmicky vinyl formats, but that condensed format works wonders for Coverdale, as her earlier releases were a bit too uneven, fitfully pastoral, and diffuse to fully connect with me (even though they all admittedly featured some occasional flashes of brilliance). With Grafts, however, she distills all of the best aspects of her work into roughly 20 minutes of lushly melodic and dreamily multilayered sustained beauty. In fact, in some ways, Grafts feels like an inspired negative image of Virgins, reimagining that nerve-jangling opus as a languorous, sensuously flowing, and gently hallucinatory reverie of hazy drones and rippling pianos.

Grafts is ostensibly composed of three separate pieces, but the boundaries between them are so blurry that they seem largely inconsequential: this EP very much feels like a single longform piece that seamlessly blossoms into new shapes as it evolves. The initial motif of the opening “2c” sounds like an elegiac and occasionally stuttering processed piano melody unfolding over a breathy bed of organ. Each time it falters, however, it seems to restart with renewed depth and more complex harmonic coloration in the periphery. 

After effectively establishing the piece’s strange momentum, Coverdale launches into a distorted harpsichord-sounding solo. For a while, that arguably becomes the piece’s primary focus, but the backdrop continues to subtly and sneakily evolve, as the piano theme coheres into an obsessively repeating pulse as the organ chords shift around it. 

In some ways, it seems an awful lot like classical minimalism, but there is a surprising amount of emotional resonance in those repeating chords and the various other layers unfold with an appealingly kinetic and organic looseness that bears no resemblance to the rigidity of Glass or Reich at all. In one of her many great tricks, Coverdale repurposes their tools to weave something quite swirling and dreamlike. Unexpectedly, that idyll is briefly disrupted by a strange small-scale storm of dissonance before the blearily gorgeous smears of piano resolve into the more sharp-focused and almost harp-like interlude of “Flutter.”

With “Flutter,” Coverdale trades in her more drone-like impulses for an undulating tapestry of sweeping and rippling piano arpeggios. That is one just small part of a richly multilayered piece though, as muted organ chords quietly evolve in the hidden depths, pointillist single notes ring out in the foreground, mysterious fluttering textures creep into the periphery, and the air fills with hazy and angelic clouds of overtones and snatches of synth melodies. It is very much a feast for the ears, though admittedly a rather short-lived one, as the final “Moments in Love” gradually emerges from the dissipating fog. 

As it slowly takes shape, it becomes clear that “Moments” is quite a bit different from the swirling lushness that pervades the rest of Grafts, settling into a strangely simmering groove of shuffling snare and a tenderly played yet murkily blown-out-sounding organ melody. Vestiges of Grafts‘ earlier passages continue to blearily hang in the air as a lingering fog, so “Moments” has the feel of a half-sensuous, half-broken coda of wounded beats and lazy melodies drifting from ruined, half-submerged speakers. 

Such a simple and damaged-sounding outro feels weirdly appropriate after the rapturous and all-enveloping bliss of the earlier half, presenting itself as a well-timed come-down before heaven becomes numbingly predictable. Naturally, part of me is mildly exasperated that Grafts is over so quickly, but that part is easily drowned out by the part of me that feels that Grafts is an absolutely perfect EP and easily the finest work of Coverdale’s career. I genuinely feel that there is not a single wasted second here, as every single moment of this EP is either bursting with inspiration or seamlessly setting the stage for the next beguiling transition.

Listen here.