KARA-LIS COVERDALE - From Where You Came

Uprooting oneself from decay, setting off on a journey, and returning to the place one came from to replant oneself in mother earth. The Odyssey of Kara-Lis Coverdale, which has lasted roughly ten years, can be summed up in these terms. A blink of an eye for astronomers, but a geological age for someone who, like the Canadian composer, pursues her own place in the world without fretting over the dictates of time, choosing the paths of the sacred while avoiding the potentially slippery trails of an at times sterile postmodernism.

Embracing reality to shed light within and without, and the here and now as an antidote to emptiness: these are the first clues for getting inside "From Where You Came". Because life is beautiful even when complicated, as Coverdale sings with a seraphic voice on "Eternity", the messianic incipit of a work that binds together the spirits of 19th-century North American folklore and a live improvisation that exemplifies the ubiquity so dear to the Montreal musician.

A kind of "diagnostic methodology for spiritual purposes" also takes shape, as she herself describes it, devised and recorded across different continents, often live: from the GRM Studio in Paris to the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm, and from the spaces of The Shop in Valens to those of Pumpkin House in St. George.

Joined by sound artist and multidisciplinary cellist Anne Bourne and trombonist Kalia Vandever, for this long-awaited return Kara-Lis Coverdale employs strings, woodwinds, brass, keyboards, software and modular synths, giving life to eleven pieces straddling electronic minimalism and classical experimentation, wrapped equally in a sense of anguish and a yearning for more or less absolute freedom. Independence as an unavoidable goal partly explains the time that has passed and the silence preceding an album that craves oceans of calm, as shown by the scant four minutes of "Flickers In The Air Of Night", almost a manifesto of the composure displayed by the instruments involved.

While the opening is steeped in the sulphurous, movements like "The Placid Illusion" release a variety of pulses. The furrows of a patch of land then serve as a postcard. A remote place reached to contemplate the night, immortalized in the cover shot by Adam Feingold, which portrays Coverdale naked, kneeling, and seen from behind, evoking a restorative perdition.

The essentiality at the heart of the movements animating "From Where You Came" is both crude oil and holy water. It's as if Kopernik were suddenly bewitched by a fleet of sirens. Or as if Raum found paradise in the woods. There's also a touch of the most pastoral Deuter or the least Tibetan Klaus Wiese. And the celestial gaze that runs through Joanna Brouk's forgotten scores resurfaces, amid woodwinds dancing on the trail of an expanded horizon ("Daze"), electronic hisses swaying across meadows like weary samurai ("Problem Of No Name"), a metaphysical liturgy driven by festive drones ("Freedom"), and an irregular leap staged in the shadows, alternating rhythms and sequences ("Offload Flip").

Kara-Lis Coverdale's imagined habitat is a plateau of Eden where doubts and certainties feed a river that flows solemnly down into the valley. Equal exchange, to use the title of the penultimate stop on a journey undertaken to bestow peace, comfort, ecstasy, and thus wonder. So much wonder.

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01/05/2025