Kara-Lis Coverdale – From Where You Came

On the opening song to her new album From Where You Came the composer and instrumentalist Kara-Lis Coverdale without the paganism or Germanic bent manages to echo the starkness of Nico’s voice on The Marble Index, a rare accolade next to a work that is mostly without peers. ‘Eternity’ is the only fully-fledged lyric on Coverdale’s album, which describes itself as a fusion of nineteenth-century programmatic music and mid-seventies jazz, the combination of strings and winds, brass, keys and modular synthesis producing a sometimes piercingly shrill and at other times billowingly ornate sound palette, emotionally complex even as it gropes after and often finds a wondrously keen and heartfelt kind of spiritualism.

From Where You Came might also call to mind new age music and the Japanese genre of kankyō ongaku with its environmental bent, associated with water features and slender chimes, plus the synthpop and power ballads of the eighties, the Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders meditation Promises with its ruminating seven-note motif, the sun-dappled and whirligig Something in the Room She Moves where Julia Holter for her latest album cosseted herself in the tipsy sounds of a jazz ensemble or the Montreal producer d’Eon who on Rhododendron and Leviathan offered a synthesised take on chamber music. In fact all of that and more is conjured on just the third track of the album, which is aptly titled ‘The Placid Illusion’.

‘Daze’ holds the listener in its thrall through a sudden gust of winds which resemble pan pipes, as the track wafts and curlicues around Andean and Celtic phrases, while ‘Problem of No Name’ recalls Björk’s wintry and domesticated classic Vespertine with its music box melodies and celeste. From Where You Came is one of those rare albums which feels as lively on the surface as it is deep, never retreating to the relative comforts of a shrugging minimalism, spartan naturalism or other thin-aired ambiances.

This is Kara-Lis Coverdale’s first album since the acclaimed Grafts appeared back in 2017. It continues to express a range of interests and influences, including the Estonian choral music which is her mother’s heritage and folk music with her great-uncle, the architect and musician Ike Volkov, a member of the longstanding ensemble Kukerpillid. From a young age she has served as the organist for local churches in Canada and has studied intently the vox humana, while her spell at the University of Western Ontario forged an interest in electronics which she has henceforth incorporated into her work.

She has collaborated extensively with Tim Hecker – for instance on his 2016 album Love Streams which was captured in Reykjavík and featured the Icelandic Choir Ensemble and his 2018 record Konoyo which was made with Tokyo Gakuso, a gagaku ensemble as he imbued his ambient electronics with the imperial court music of Japan – and the enigmatic producer LXV while also appearing alongside How To Dress Well, Floating Points, Actress and Lyra Pramuk.

From Where You Came was mostly captured and completed in rural Ontario, yet two of its standout performances in ‘Problem of No Name’ and ‘Freedom’ were recorded at the GRM studios in Paris and Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm, two of the world’s pioneering sites for electroacoustics and musique concrète. ‘Problem of No Name’ beckons those limpid and beatific sounds of the voix humaine and voix céleste while ‘Freedom’ stretches trumpet fanfares and bagpipe drones out like putty, with the demeanour of a fife and drum corps awestruck by some sublimity whose swells might well soundtrack the cosmic reckoning of a Terrence Malick picture.

‘Offload Flip’ is a marked shift by way of its hydraulic, sample-based percussion and ‘Habitat’ is a steeped and nymphic ritual while on ‘Equal Exchange’ the pervasive winds get a bit more separation, like slender trees or sheets of paper steadily blowing apart in the mix.

Anne Bourne’s enveloping and sometimes swooning cello adds breadth to the low end on three tracks, including the opener ‘Eternity’ whose vestigial snippets like ‘Whenever the night falls [. . .] even before black and white [. . .] everything you know is real’ echo in mood and tone the Julee Cruise, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti standards ‘The World Spins’ and ‘Falling, plus ‘Flickers in the Air of Night’ which reminds me of ‘All of the colours are singing’ by Jessica Ackerley with its pitched melodies and dialup harmonics. Then on the album closer ‘The Ceremonial Entrance of Colour’ the trombonist Kalia Vandever – fresh from tilt with Isabel Crespo Pardo and Carmen Quill plus her leading and solo standouts Regrowth and We Fell in Turn – fills out the picture, a regal procession which retains Coverdale’s air of fantasy.