With Kara-Lis Coverdale, every timbre tells a story. To hear the Canadian sound artist discuss her instruments is to marvel at the way technology can channel both the cultural and the personal. The pipe organ she played growing up in church is more than just shorthand for the holy; it’s the original synthesizer, a tool for Coverdale to recreate voices both human and nonhuman, depending on which reed stop she uses. When she was 10, a crude boom box with an artificial bass-boost function taught her about dubbing tracks, and that remixing could be a creative act in itself. The piano’s damper pedal, she has explained, freed the hand from the constraints of the keyboard and opened up a world of expression. “Anything can have a voice,” she says in the announcement for From Where You Came, her first album in eight years. “For me, voice is beyond human.”
This studied attention to detail has led to a body of work where sounds are rich with complexity, their emotions uncertain and in between. Albums like A 480 and Aftertouches flitted between fractured orchestration and uncanny-valley minimalism. The increased clarity of 2017’s Grafts revealed even deeper wrinkles, delicately flowing through a weightless, unnatural calm. Since then she’s mostly composed for concert halls and installations, performing in ensembles with Tim Hecker and Floating Points and collaborating with Actress and Yasuaki Shimizu. But in returning to the album format, From Where You Came shows a prettier side of Coverdale than we’ve seen before. The edges have been all but completely buffered down, making way for one big exhale of shimmering strings and synthesizers. It’s peaceful—perhaps to a fault.
For the most part, From Where You Came floats in a comfortable daze. The synth clusters of “Flickers in the Air of Night” swell and swirl against Anne Bourne’s cello, rising like steam from a hot spring. The contrast of cold and warmth is no accident. From Where You Came plays like a tribute to the cold winters and wooded lakes of her upbringing in the rural Ontario community of Valens, where family tradition paired ice-water plunges with hot saunas. Rather than diving into the subtleties of her music’s textures, however, Coverdale often hovers just at the edge of them, passively observing until they dissipate into thin air.
Coverdale seems stuck between wanting to develop her tracks into full-fledged songs and making them mesmerizing enough that you surrender to the drift. “Daze,” one of the album’s strongest moments, weaves its mellotron-esque melodies around each other like birds dancing through the sky, picking up heft as a bassy low end kicks in. It feels like it might be going somewhere epic, but ultimately ends up noodling about for the song’s remaining minutes; repetition pushes past meditation and into lethargy. The seven-minute cruiser “Freedom” sets up potentially interesting contrasts as horns billow against a buzzing sound like digital cicadas, but by the end it doesn’t reveal much beyond a glazed sense of cheeriness. Less than two minutes long, “Coming Around” fits more ideas into a much shorter span, growing from a downtrodden murmur of keys into an aching melody that suggests sprites warbling up at the stars.
There are occasional breaks from the whimsy: On “Offload Flip,” Coverdale deploys a distended drum loop as if she were reversing a record scratch in slow motion, while “Problem of No Name” fully gives into the void, her pitch-shifted tones twinkling like the lights of a small town flashing on a darkened hillside. At its best, From Where You Came makes for some high-grade sleep music—which is both pleasant and a little disappointing, coming from an artist as distinctive as Coverdale. There’s less nuance than in her previous work, and the simplified sounds and feelings imbue the music with a precious, new-agey sense of contentment. Anything can have a voice, yet when she opens the album with her own, dolefully chanting, “Everything you know is real/I’m sorry life is beautiful,” I wish she had let the sounds speak for themselves.
