Montreal-based composer Kara-Lis Coverdale’s output exists somewhere between computer music and the understated acoustic melancholy of Erik Satie. Trained as a classical pianist, Coverdale began incorporating electronics into her practice while studying music in Ontario, and has since worked with artists including Tim Hecker and LXV. Her music is process-minded but accessible, too, with a habit of remaining understated as it transports the listener to sometimes-dramatic interior landscapes.
Though she’s put out a handful of EPs, Grafts feels like a continuation of Coverdale’s 2014 cassette A 480. The five tracks on A 480 were built from a limited library of vocal samples, which were processed and looped into modal compositions—cool, melodic, and structurally simple, but occasionally plunging into extended contemplative passages. Even at its most immersive, that release seemed notable for its boundaries: each track discrete, possessing its own architecture. While nodding back to A 480’s icy samples, the three sections that make up Grafts take a more fluid shape, bleeding into one another to form an arc.
The keyboard phrase that opens the release establishes a sober calm, warmed by a border of machine fuzz. It gently stutters as it loops, a base for the wandering free associations of a harpsichord-like sound. Gradually, the piece thickens; the keyboards establish a more insistent pace as other melodic elements wander in and out. Among these are futuristic glitches and shimmers that aren’t far off from the sounds favored by musicians who use computer music to think through digital realities. But Coverdale approaches such elements with an assimilative touch. There’s no novelty in her application of technology, and in particular no sense of detachment about her compositions, however chilled their aesthetics.
Indeed, Grafts’ second phase has an aching quality, a rippling sample holding ground while faraway piano chords produce a sort of celestial drama. Coverdale’s music is sometimes described as ambient or drone, but this narrative dynamism suggests otherwise; her sound feels indebted more to an older generation of minimalist composers. Still, the final and longest phase is restful, lingering unhurried on a mellifluous passage. Opening up rather than illustrating as it cycles, it ambivalently taps into internal space.
Coverdale has worked as an organist at a handful of churches, including a recent stint at St. John Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Montreal. Her electronics contain shades of the devotional. Some passages—particularly in the first two parts of Grafts—nod to the sweeping tendencies of church music, while others hold space for a more atemporal and vaguely new age-y meditation. With Grafts, Coverdale seems to propose a decidedly agnostic vision of what devotional electronics could mean in our contemporary moment, folding a natural awareness of technology’s forms into music that feels insistently about being present.
