Kara-Lis Coverdale

From Where You Came (Smalltown Supersound)

Contact Ahmad Asani about Kara-Lis Coverdale

Kara-Lis Coverdale — “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian) — announces her first new album in eight years, From Where You Came, out May 9th via Smalltown Supersound, and shares its lead single “Daze.”

 

A dynamic and sublime work steeped in emotion and sensitivity, From Where You Came unspools as a series of nocturnal transmissions, altered-state refinements, and vivid stories, rich in vibrant, illuminating qualities. Drawing together 19th century programmatic music, mid-’70s jazz, and her distinctively colorful and multi-dimensional approach to composition, she conducts emotional resonance like currents of charge, hard-wiring the purely felt into electronic signals.

 

Though written and recorded across several continents, including at the GRM Studio in Paris and the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm, From Where You Came was completed in rural Ontario, Canada. Featuring contributions from multidisciplinary sound artist and cellist Anne Bourne and GRAMMY award winning trombone prodigy Kalia Vandever, the album’s eleven expansive yet condensed compositions incorporate strings, woodwind, brass, keys, software and modular synthesis, inscribing a musical language that resonates animations with unfiltered, striking clarity. “Anything can have a voice,” says Coverdale. “For me, voice is beyond human”.

 

Reckoning with the experience of grief, dislocation, and the pressure of total freedom and independence, Coverdale yields supernatural capacity to transfer tribulation into highly imaginative and inspiring fantasy epics of sound. Lead single “Daze” feels like the joy of flight — wind choruses dance and twirl in ornate cycles as dissonant portamentos ascend to soaring heights, gliding across turbulent gales to new pockets of harmonic plateaus.