It’s been a minute since the Canadian composer, musician, and producer Kara-Lis Coverdale has released a body of work, so From Where You Came, her new album on Smalltown Supersound, comes not a minute too soon. On her first major solo project since 2017, Coverdale, whose singular CV would be hard to summarize—she’s played in Estonian folk bands and studied at MIT and toured with Death Grips and, since she’s been a teenager, served as an organist at churches across Canada—offers a snapshot of her multifaceted life as an artist.

The record sees Coverdale tapping into her full range of skills, from site-specific performance to electronic composition to methodologies more rooted in her religious music background. It’s an enveloping listen, both nuanced and totalizing; it has the patina of electronic music’s formative decades foregrounded by an elusive, contemporary gristle. I wanted to learn more about the new record, and everything the artist has been up to over the past many years, so I sent over some questions. Her answers are below.

You haven’t released a major solo work since 2017. How did you approach making From Where You Came, and is it a departure from your processes on previous releases?

Kara Lis-Coverdale: The making of From Where You Came spans a long period of time, the beginning of which is actually around 2017, following when I packed up my apartment in Montreal and went abroad to follow music. This record is as much a document of life through music as it is an exploration in large system performance, experimenting with how internal processes could be amplified for large stages and utilize full spectrum writing. While the circumstances are different and much more contextually diverse than other works, there remains an urgent need to express feeling—in the sense of the word—and define core, while trying to keep alive our own will to go forward. 

The influences on this new record span a lot of traditions and timelines. What melds together these disparate inputs? 

Time. These works were written at different moments and places, but in the phase where there was enough stillness and perspective to see what had actually been documented with distance, there were arcs that emerged, in harmonic centre, melodic character, temperament, and a commitment to sound system. Acoustic writing for the record came toward the end of the process for grounding, as some symbolic promise of end to major health issues and breathing room to get better. But yes, past, present, and future are always in dialogue with my own being in an embodied, physical sense, and this record is a document of change as much as it is an exploration of what I cannot do without. What I actually interpret changes every time I listen these days, but my training in conservation and restoration is also a guide I can hear clearly.

Is there an instrument or effect that you think helped to define this new album?

The Equalizer. It’s almost become a cornerstone of law within the work. It’s a constant awareness of what comprises a totality.

What is the biggest difference between how you approach your solo records and how you approach doing soundtrack or installation work?

Solo records have been less connected to place in particular, but this is changing for me as well. There was a period where I was creating entirely new performances for each venue, studying and preparing very closely ahead of time what the exact space would be, examining how sound would move across the room, considering how I could utilize each situation musically. A nuanced approach to considering performance possibility is involved, so it has been useful for me to separate those more “art” oriented works from “musical" ones, so I can re-orient myself towards the music itself, where there is less tuning to context. 

With a lot of the work on From Where You Came, there is a tuning into the nature of energy itself. I was performing in a lot of power plants for a while, and I really tapped into the idea of a pure circuit of energy, aligning source with output as closely as possible, trying to find transparency. I really loved how this idea was beyond identity, nether, ubiquitous but unseen. At the same time, how do we bring the logic of the Earth’s life into abstracted, built spaces? The problem becomes geologic. The artist must animate. But in these contexts where the work was heard was beyond just an LP or recording for playback release; it was meant for places or situations that were technically and contextually nuanced, where the complex nature of system ontology versus acoustic in space was part of the transmission, made obvious for consideration. 

It still feels relatively absurd to have these tracks considered alongside the pop industrial complex. But anyway, an extreme distinction of these outlets was necessary for a time because I was experimenting with what is possible and trying to define what the work is and where it is meant to live, but living outside industrial reproduction also resulted in what I could call an extreme ephemerality in the work, as they became moments in time, beyond industrial, ultimately precarious. 

You’ve opened shows for some pretty big, more mainstream-leaning acts. What have those experiences been like? 

My energy is already tuned to crowds and large systems, it comes naturally to me to be on big stages because of my spatial sense. The experiences on tour with different acts varies culturally speaking of course; the Death Grips audience is passionate and involved, feeling everything, no need to contain what resonance they experience. They were right there with me at every turn of the dial. I found that so beautiful and invigorating. Caribou is a groove audience, and Big Thief audiences feel wildly impossible to pin down as a whole. This variation may all be confusing for readers who have never experienced a live show of mine, but I see physicality as the thread here.

Do you listen to much contemporary music? Are there any records or tracks that have been exciting you lately?

I went through a few years where I didn’t listen to anything at all, but this was highly unusual. At the moment I am tuned into the intensity that is friends who are going through brave releases: Actress, Lyra Pramuk, Moses Sumney, James Krivchenia, Sarah Davachi, and I follow Devonte Hynes’s diversity of skill and interests closely.  

You are posted up in front of a church organ. There’s no score in front of you. What do you like to play to warm up your fingers and test the room?

Oh! Technique first always. First thing I’d reach for is an arpeggiated string of diminished 7ths, ascending to open ended space at the end to measure action weight versus how it travels in the acoustic. The equal spacing between pitches on the keyboard levels fingers and I can measure four pitches in ascension at once which is efficient, given warmups are always too short. After that I’d move inward. 

What’s your favorite thing to do in the summer in Montreal?

Walk around like a bee.