At the beginning of the year, Kara-Lis Coverdale hadn’t released any recorded music since 2017. Then it all came pouring out. The Canadian composer’s first full-length of 2025, From Where You Came, was a summation of how she spent the intervening years: staging sound-bath installations in saunas, playing in the ensembles for Floating Points and Tim Hecker, and composing for chamber orchestras, choirs, and her childhood love, the pipe organ. While that record’s dreamy, digi-orchestral atmospherics sometimes gave way under the weight of re-establishing Coverdale as an album artist, two subsequent projects have scoped out the periphery of her practice and been more compelling for it. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever takes the acoustic piano as its near-single-minded focus, while Changes in Air loosens that restriction only slightly to incorporate organ and modular synthesizer into a drone piece. Together, they form a treatise on the lingering note.
As a percussive instrument, once struck, the piano cannot crescendo. A note’s expiration, however, can be prolonged. On A Series of Actions, Coverdale draws out the vapor trails from each key. The record is atmospheric in the most literal sense, like a collection of weather phenomena all taking place well above the Arctic Circle. Coverdale also foregrounds the material components of her chosen instrument—wood, steel, ivory—and its physical limitations. You can hear her audibly press the sustain pedal into gear on the Ruins-esque “In Charge of the Hour,” while “Lowlands” creates, through what must be a trick of microphone placement, the effect of being positioned below her foot, capturing those distinctive (and familiar, to anyone who took childhood piano lessons) whooshes and creaks. At the climax of “Turning Multitudes,” which by this point has woven a weir out of Ravel, Sakamoto, and Satie, Coverdale seems to reach for a note higher than the highest she can play.
