Kara-Lis Coverdale - From Where You Came Kara-Lis Coverdale

A dynamic and sublime work rich 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 colourful and multi-dimensional approach to composition that embraces improvisation, Coverdale alloys synthesis with live instrumentation in a genreless yet distinctly identifiable gesture of reconnection with land and body through sound. Approaching composition as a diagnostic methodology to spiritual ends, she conducts emotional resonance like currents of charge, hard-wiring the purely felt into electronic signals. 

Though written and recorded on 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 11 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.” Fittingly, it’s the artist’s own voice that melts into air amidst the enveloping swell of the album’s opening prelude: “Everything you know is real,” she sings on “Eternity,” “I’m sorry, life is beautiful… .” 
As though in response, oscillating vividly between animism and animalism, the album that follows is absolutely brimming with life in all its stunning complexity. 

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. In the piloted flight of “Daze,” wind choruses dance and twirl in ornate punctuated cycles as dissonant portamentos annotate modulatory ascent to soaring heights, gliding and churning across turbulent gails to new pockets of harmonic plateaus, stabilizing periodically through rhythmic gait for rest. It feels like the joy of flight. In other spiritual quests, sound becomes a feat of physics; physical and subterranean, and even destructive, amongst highland drone figures in “Freedom.” Sense melancholic restlessness, and desire to overcome in the furtive flurries of energy on “Coming Around,” the skittish, tacit, and reluctantly yearning chimes of “Problem of No Name,” and the ecstatic, messy-haired catharsis of the drummed sample-based sequences of “Offload Flip.”

Each new narrative finds rootedness in a changing environment, giving a sense this is ecological adaptation made into music, as a way to navigate being in the world. Speaking directly to the rootlessness and alienation of modernity while processing the thrill and pain of being alive, From Where You Came draws immense strength through a commitment to material groundedness, from where we are able to view the scale of our own mythology, the worlds we want to build, and the stories we are determined to tell.