Kara-Lis Coverdale

Shawn Reynaldo

Joining me on the couch today is a composer, a piano player, an organist, an experimental artist. Just a very talented woman. She hails from Canada, currently lives in Montreal. Please help me in welcoming Kara-Lis Coverdale. [applause]

I want to start out today, I just listed off all of these different things that you do, and I thought it might be helpful to just start by playing a piece of music from you and then we could talk about it. This is something that came out in 2014, and it’s the title track of, I guess it’s an album or a cassette, it was called A 480. Do you call it an album?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I guess you could call it an album, yeah.

Shawn Reynaldo

All right. We’ll talk more about it after we hear it. let’s just check this out for a couple minutes.

(music: Kara-Lis Coverdale – “A 480”)

[applause] I want to talk specifically about this piece, but just as a little bit of background, you are a classically trained musician, as they say.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah.

Shawn Reynaldo

When did you start playing piano?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Five.

Shawn Reynaldo

And when did you start actually composing?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I guess it was a little bit later, like ten maybe.

Shawn Reynaldo

Oh yeah, really old. When this release came out, I thought one thing that was really interesting is that it came with a sort of score. Could you do me a favor and pull up image number two right now? That’s the score that came along with the record. It doesn’t really look... Can you explain what the hell that is? Because it certainly doesn’t look like the usual set of notes composed on.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, I guess it’s a graphic score, essentially. All notation is a graphic, think of it that way. But A 480, I guess to answer the question I’d have to back up a little bit. At that time, I was working a lot with digital downloading technologies and investigating source allocation I guess, with media, and getting into the source of the musical objects I was using to create music. And I was particularly interested in the sample pack at the time. This was... I was writing things around 2012, 2013. It was released a little later.

The work I wanted to index... The point that more increasingly, people were working with sound files instead of sound objects, and I wanted to make the work downloadable and turn into a treasure hunt for people who did have the score. So it’s a way of seeing the way that the stems are organized in a grid-like structure. When I ended up sending out the score, a lot of people embarked on this hunt to figure out where the sources came from. It was actually from a sample library created in California, but it was at this seminal time where the idea that one source could end up at any location and property rights around music production started to fall apart at that time. So it was indexing that whole sphere of economy around music.

Shawn Reynaldo

So on that track we just heard, essentially it was all constructed of vocal samples from a sample pack?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah.

Shawn Reynaldo

What made you think that that was a rich-earth to source for making your music? Especially coming from a classical background?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I guess that I was studying... I’ve just always been a big music fan as well as someone who makes music. This was the direction I saw. I mean most of you probably work with samples, almost all of you probably. But from the tradition I came from, this very much isn’t part of the vocabulary, at all, of what music is. And when I was studying, even when I was doing my masters, it was very much like I had to fight my way through the academy in order... It’s not like this space, I had to really... I was one of the first people writing on that kind of stuff, and it still wasn’t taken very seriously at the time.

Shawn Reynaldo

Let’s talk a bit more about your time gravitating from classical composition to more experimental territory. Did that start while you were getting your masters in a proper academy?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I think it started far earlier, when I was young, just being an outsider in many ways. But I was very much... I was a good student, I would say. At the same time, I did my two hours every day practice, that kind of thing. I was quite vigilant about that and very dedicated throughout my entire life. But I guess I’ve always been an advocate of individualism in music, and experimentalism is the only avenue that allows that. I mean when you’re a music student, your entire first 15, 20 years of production is all about fitting into someone else’s glove and then you try on all these different personalities and these different ideas and ways of being, ways of thinking and ways of feeling. And then eventually, you have to make your own glove. And I think experimentalism was the best way to go through that. Classical music is also a really weird word because classical really only refers to the 18th century, but of course, when you’re classical, in the common understanding of the word, or in the non-common understanding of the word rather, it actually encompasses anything from year one of human existence, or the earth and the wind.

Shawn Reynaldo

When you were getting started as a child, you are not only in this really structured environment, but it was also a competitive environment as well. Correct?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah. I did competitions, that kind of thing.

Shawn Reynaldo

Were you successful in these competitions?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I was very competitive at the time, but I was pretty relaxed also, I think, sometimes.

Shawn Reynaldo

How would you be competitive? Were you sabotaging the competitions?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

No. I was very internally focused, maybe I was competitive with myself, I would say. And then supportive of anyone else who was doing the same thing. It’s not really about beating the person next to you, it’s about your internal victories, let’s say. So yeah, in that sense, I was always a tightly wound coil, I guess.

Shawn Reynaldo

Were you a little stress case around the house when you had a competition?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah. The day of performance week or competition week was always very intense because... I mean even the classical upbringing, I guess we’re going to go into this as an angle, anyone here who has had kind of that training can sympathize with the idea that the third bar in the second cadenza has four 16th notes and there’s a crescendo across those four and if you decrescendo then you’re playing that segment wrong. So it’s a hyper-performative practice that is expected to be reiterated in immaculate detail. And so there’s a lot of information, especially, I think, for a young kid. It’s not really a freeing sense of music production.

Shawn Reynaldo

What was your first real exposure to finding freedom in music? When did you first start to veer out of just playing piano and doing these competitions?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I actually had a lot of avenues for just doing weird stuff at home. I played other instruments a lot that there was no pressure around, or no existing tradition. I guess that’s kind of the problem, when you have tradition around an instrument, there’s this whole... It’s not really a problem, it can be very beautiful, but there’s an entire technique library. But I had an accordion around that I shredded a lot and that was fun. One of the first things I saved up for as a kid was a boombox. It was like $400, Sony Mega Bass, with the singular Mega Bass buttons that you could boost the bass. It had two tape players in it so you could dub off the radio, and a CD player in the top. I actually didn’t understand it as a creative act at the time, to do that kind of musical activity, or I didn’t consider it something that I would share to a teacher or something. That wasn’t until much later, in maybe 2007, that I got more into that seriously.

Shawn Reynaldo

I think it’s worth noting that while you are messing around with this Mega Bass button in your boombox, what environment were you living in?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I was in the country, Yeah. I was in the country, I grew up in the country. My closest neighbor was maybe a kilometer and a half away, so I was an internet kid in many regards, and I started with downloading at around that time. And those outside voices were very important for me, maybe more important than they were for somebody who was living in an urban area because they were that much more fresh, or just hearing it for the first time when you’re growing up around grass and stuff is different than street clammer or whatever.

Shawn Reynaldo

Weren’t you really into Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang Clan?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I got into them in high school.

Shawn Reynaldo

Did their stories of street knowledge really relate to your rural Ontario experience? What did you connect with in that music?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Well, when I was 16 I got a car with my butter tart money, I worked at a butter tart store.

Shawn Reynaldo

What is butter tart for the non-Canadians?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It’s a Canadian delicacy. It’s this weird tart that has a... You fold the tart, and I was called the “Queen of Sheeta” at the time, because you have to sheet the dough down and put it through this dough press and it goes through five or six times, then you stamp out these little circular things and then you put them into a pan. I was a machine with this, I was the fastest and I had the best, most perfect tart shells.

Shawn Reynaldo

So apparently your competitive nature extended outside of the piano realm?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, I like speed and repetitive things. [laughs]

Shawn Reynaldo

And while you were growing up in the country and doing piano competitions and listening to Mobb Deep at home...

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah that’s why I started talking about the butter tarts, because rap sounds really good in the car. I always had the big CD bible and just liked listening to good shit.

Shawn Reynaldo

Was it the lyrics or was it the music?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It was the music, but it was also the lyrics. I mean, I knew them. But generally with music, I’m much more of a sonic person than a textual one. I comprehend the inflection of the voice, the delivery and the intent and the emotional weight behind it but the actual word itself registers second.

So yeah, but I always loved the productions and I was always trying to make them on the piano and whatever I had around, but of course... You quite quickly discover that you can’t capture [Mobb Deep's] "Hell on Earth" on your acoustic piano in your living room. So then there was another avenue of “How do I enrich things I make with the artifact of recording technology?” I think that rap production was the very first electronic music I really listened to and was into in that regard.

Shawn Reynaldo

I really like the idea of you trying to recreate RZA beats on piano at home. Especially because I know you were also actively playing at the church. Can you tell me a bit about the role that the church had in your upbringing and in your musical story?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, so when I was 14 I started as a church organist, and that was a funny time. It was kinda rough at first because there’s so much repertoire to learn as a... I remember being overwhelmed for many weeks and being like, “This is too much for me.” But after a while you just learn all the music and it just comes out, but my family’s also part Estonian so I grew up going to Estonian school and Estonian church and stuff like that. Estonian summer camp. This was an Estonian church so it’s not very many people there. And anyways, they would ask me to play piano often and accompany people, just as a way to exercise my ability. And then the organist who was there, Eva Rammo, she eventually just asked me if I wanted to take over and I said sure. It was a good job for me for many, many years. I was there for quite a minute.

Shawn Reynaldo

Are you religious? Or were you religious personally at the time?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I wanted to play music and the pipe organ was an amazing instrument. I mean, I still think of it as the first synthesizer. It is the first synthesizer. And it was actually quite integral with how I started thinking about layering sounds and pitches and thinking about timbral writing instead of just harmonic writing, of course because the vocabulary of the piano is quite monochromatic. So to think about how I could, bandoneon or there are some flutes or diapason, all these different textures and colors was a really interesting world. And then also with the bass footboard, it also was really interesting to me. So I wouldn’t saying it was a religious calling or anything, I think most organists would agree that it’s more of a musical calling.

Shawn Reynaldo

Was it ever strange to be playing your music in an environment that comes with a lot of, let’s say, historical baggage and a lot of philosophical baggage as well. I mean, I assume you’re waiting in between sermons to play your music but you’re still hearing the sermons each week.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah I think it’s a little different for me also because the services were in another language.

Shawn Reynaldo

Were they in Estonian?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

They were, but I speak Estonian. But the language used in church is another level. I just... Be preparing my things in my head, when I had to play. Sure there’s a certain tone there, and I think the architecture is one of them, of the space and the arrangement. The way that with the organ your back is always turned to everybody rather than in other performance situations, you’re facing. So there’s a degree of anonymity that comes with performing, at least in the church tradition I was working in, that kinda comes with it. You’re there to share a musical object rather than your personal object. Ultimately I think that just made my music better.

Shawn Reynaldo

Well you’ve mentioned the role of Estonian culture and identity and I want to talk a little more about that, but first I thought we should play something. This is from a piece that you put together in Estonia, I believe, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Estonian republic, correct me if I’m wrong. Can you tell me just a bit about this project and then we’ll listen to some of it?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, this project was last year and the director of the first Estonian-speaking theater got in touch with me because he was interested in doing work around language, exclusively, and the multiplicity of language. The idea of what comes first, the natural world or the language we use to describe the natural world? And all of these meta ideas around communication, I would say. He got in touch with me because I talk about vocal work a lot and the manipulation of the voice and altering sonic identity in ways that can flip meaning, and we started working on it last year and I ended up focusing more on... Actually the work originally was meant to investigate the early 20th century, because there was a massive explosion with the technological revolution at the time, there was a lot of growth in the medical sciences and so all over the world there was a massive expansion of language generally, but in Estonia in particular there was the language father, they call him. There’s many different linguists that have their different approaches to the expansion of language. It’s very individualized. But with Estonia, they tend to expand language from within language, so it’s an internal growth.

But I wanted to focus on the hyper-futuristic aspect of Estonian economy. That word keeps coming up today. Estonia’s the first digital ID nation and they invented Skype and there’s lots of super modern things going on there but they’re also a medieval culture in many ways. It’s like this hyper-future, hyper-past dichotomy.

So I found this coding book one time when I was coming back from Riga. No, Cēsis actually, in Latvia, and I was on the train after this crazy night in Cēsis. And coming back to work on the piece and I found this coding book in an old Russian-built train station in a weird open library. It was very surreal, the whole encounter with this library in the train station. It was so deserted but immaculate and it was coming out of Soviet times. And then this coding book appeared, and for the work I ended up extracting several excerpts from within that book and then I had these singers from the theater sing them out so there’s... That’s what this is.

Shawn Reynaldo

All right. Simple concept. What’s the name of this piece?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

The name of the entire piece is “Marjamaa Laulud,” which is... Yeah. It’s like “songs of this country,” I guess you could say.

Shawn Reynaldo

All right. Let’s listen. Just for reference, the piece is 29 minutes long, we’re only going to hear the first four or five minutes of it. So let’s check this out.

(music: Kara-Lis Coverdale - “Marjamaa Laulud”)

[applause] Can you tell us the name of that piece again? ‘Cause I can’t pronounce Estonian.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

“Marjamaa Laulud.”

Shawn Reynaldo

And just to clarify, so the voices we heard there was an Estonia choir reciting phrases that you got from a coding book.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Written in Estonian, yes.

Shawn Reynaldo

So there really is a clash of modernity and history going on on several levels with that.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah and just also the chaos of my own personal experience I guess, as someone who travels a lot.

Shawn Reynaldo

I mean I want to ask about how you feel in relation to your Estonian heritage, ’cause it seems like you grew up going to Estonian church, your mother is Estonian, you learned the language but you grew up in Canada. Did you feel Estonian when you were growing up or did it feel just like this thing that your parents made you do?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

No, I felt Estonian. Very much. But everything my grandparents did was Estonian. Yeah it’s a very rich cultural existence being... It’s active work and there’s a really deep folk heritage there, especially with folk music and I was always active in choirs and I was always behind the piano accompanying choirs and... Not in the religious sense at all, I’m talking folk choirs. My mom has several folk choir records that she recorded with her buddies when she was a teenager. Beautiful records with amazing covers. My mom did all the graphic design and calligraphy.

But yeah, there was a large community, but at the same time I felt a bit of an outsider again. That there was a little bit of a clique-y element around it sometimes. Yeah. I guess that’s maybe where I’m Canadian. [laughs]

Shawn Reynaldo

How did the experience of growing up Estonian in Canada compare with when you went to Estonia, and I believe you spent four months living there while you were making this piece?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I did. That was my choice. I wanted to have feet on ground and take the time to make something that felt like an immediate document of what the country was like at the time and how I found myself as someone standing in it.

But I had been to Estonia several times before. Mainly to visit family but also the trips were always organized around the choir festival that takes place every four years there. I don’t know if anyone here knows about it, I think it must be one of the largest choir festivals in the world, but Estonians are understood now and in the historical record to have sung themselves to freedom from Russian occupation. And so they formed this human singing chain across the Baltic states and imbued a lot of their choral work with protest lyrics, and they held several protest rallies through song all over Estonia. And to this day they preserve, despite that Estonia is now free, they preserve the tradition and remember their independence and what it took to acquire it again through these song festivals. And there’s 30,000 singers on stage at once, so you can imagine what that sounds like. It’s a pretty insane experience, but even a year and a half leading up to the festival, they commission composers to create new works and then they send out choir directors to each different choir all over the world because you have to audition in order to make it into the... You have to be serious and show your dedication to learning the repertoire. And so then they send out the directors to get everyone on the same page and then you all meet at the same time and there’s this procession through the city and everyone’s crying and everyone in the country comes to greet this choir. There’s about 110,000 people on this song festival grounds and there’s a torch and they take the torch up the tower and light the tower up, very Olympian kind of tradition. And then they sing these beautiful pieces together.

Shawn Reynaldo

When you had the Estonian choir singing these lines from a coding book you discovered, did they look at you like, “Why are you having us sing this stuff?” How collaborative was the process?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It was quite collaborative. We talked about it throughout. And initially I was a little bit hesitant because... I wasn’t hesitant, I knew that they asked me to do the work because they knew what I’m into and so I had a certain element of confidence there, but sure, they had to assure me a few times that it was fine that I just go with my vision, because, of course, when you’re asked to do a project of that scale for an audience that’s nationwide rather than scene-wide. It was a little bit different so I felt like there were a lot of expectations. I had to sort out what I wanted to say and I had to make sure that it was poignant for the time so... But I think it turned out quite well. Although it was very modern, I will say. It was received in a very modern way. People were like, “This is very interesting.”

Shawn Reynaldo

I think being an organ player, or often times being a piano player, can be a very solitary endeavor. And even being an electronic producer can often be a solitary endeavor, but you’ve also done a lot of collaboration in the last several years. Can you talk about why you like to collaborate and what you get from the process?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Collaboration’s about rubbing up against others, fundamentally. And sharing. I mean, it’s not really fun. The point of music is to sound out and to listen to other sounds being sounded out. Unless you just want to be in the black box forever and it’s not very fun. [laughs]

With collaboration I tend to just go with my gut, and whatever is interesting for me or just listening for sympathetic resonance, and then also sometimes not. Some of the best collaborations have been the most unexpected ones also. Or also, ones that have been very difficult at first and then years later you can look back at it like, “Ah.”

Shawn Reynaldo

What was a difficult collaboration if you don’t mind spilling the beans?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Well they are all a little bit difficult, aren’t they? I mean, in their special ways?

Shawn Reynaldo

I want to ask about one collaboration in particular. I mean, just to give people reference, you’ve worked with artists like How To Dress Well and Tim Hecker, but I actually want to ask about your work with LXV and you guys did a collaborative album together. Came out in 2015, it’s called Sirens. You actually never met in person before you started making this record. Can you talk about how that came about?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, I’d heard David’s music...David Sutton is LXV. He’s from Pennsylvania and I heard his SoundCloud. This was in the earlier days of SoundCloud. I don’t really cruise SoundCloud as much as I did back then. But it was a great place then to hear new stuff and the other day I was even talking about blogs and how it was the only way to hear about new music and then SoundCloud came out and opened this dam of chaos. But yeah, this was just post-blog I would say, but blogs were still relevant at the time as gatekeepers of sonic production in the netherworlds of experientialism. I was really into, hyper into, digital modes of production and also just aesthetics generally and narratives and David was very hardcore at the time. And so we just ended up sharing a few messages and decided to make something and we worked on that record for a year and a half just by proxy. And then we met in New York City. We had a gig at... I can’t think of the name right now. Trans-Pecos. In the basement. James Place was running a series down there. Cienfuegos and a few others were playing that night. It was a loud show, and yeah, it was a crazy gig because I mean, this person who I made a whole record with I was just meeting with for the first time. We rehearsed somewhere in Bushwick that day and it was a real chaotic... It was a great day actually. And the set was really good, surprisingly.

Shawn Reynaldo

Did you like each other? Were you worried leading up to it that you were going to meet this guy and he’s going to be a jerk or something?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

No, I knew he would be fine.

Shawn Reynaldo

So you’re still friends.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah. Yeah we’re still friends.

Shawn Reynaldo

All right. Let’s hear something from that record. Again the album is called Sirens. This song is called “Disney.”

(music: Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV – “Disney”)

[applause] That was “Disney,” a collaboration that Kara-Lis did with LXV, and listening to that piece and some of the other music we’ve heard, I feel like there’s this grandiosity to your music in a way, that it just sounds like it’s made for these large, regal spaces and I wanted to ask... You obviously come from this background of playing in churches and playing organ music. Some people call it sacred music. Do you think about place and ideas of space when you’re composing and putting together your music?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I think I think about the concert a lot, and just what I would want to hear as someone who is going to listen to music rather than be functional to music. I think about the architecture quite a bit. That kind of comes later though, when I’m deciding what to share in terms of a program for whatever avenue I’m sharing in. But sometimes if I know ahead of time if I’m writing something for a particular event and I know the space, then I might think about it.

Shawn Reynaldo

Can we pull up image number seven please? This is a photo from a show that happened just a few weeks ago in Montreal, and that is Kara-Lis in the middle of a very large space and you can flip through image eight and nine. Can you tell us a bit about this show and how you prepare for playing in a space like that?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

This show had a lot of reverb, it was like nine seconds. But a lot of spaces, when you’re playing a power plant or something, for instance, that’s also nine seconds. You have to be a little more patient when you’re sending things through. To be a little Alvin Lucier about it, consider the media’s traveling throughout the box. It’s something to consider for sure, when you’re coming from more controlled, hyper-controlled production environments where the monitors are set exactly at an array of XY and, “No, you gotta have that tweeter up a little higher because...” People can get really crazy about hi-fi and listening playbacks and mixing stuff. But when you go to share it in a live setting you have to learn how to deal with physics on a more immediate level.

Shawn Reynaldo

That makes me wonder, with your live shows, how improvised is it? I figure when you’re working with these long-form tones and changing reverbs depending on the space, there has to be some level of flexibility to it or maybe there isn’t. You tell me.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It really depends. The liveness is, of course, a really age-old concept by now for people who work in... For people who consider recorded media their primary media. I don’t really concern myself with what is liveness. A lot of these works I cannot do them live. I mean live in the sense that each single note is performed out in real time, played by a finger or something. So I just consider playback technologies an extension of my brain at this point, and body. But this show, or the one that was up there, there was 20 minutes of organ improv. There’s ways to have fun in the moment, and there was also a vocalist working with me there. It’s something to keep flexible with, I think, and think of different ways of, I don’t want to say remix because it doesn’t feel right either, re-work the memory.

Shawn Reynaldo

Clearly, you’re someone who thinks a lot about your music when you’re making it and it seems like there’s a lot of ideas of theory and history and how humans relate to technology going in and I want to show a couple more images. Can you show image number three? Admittedly this is something that I took off of Kara-Lis’ Instagram. And then can we show image number four? Oh, it’s sideways, but it’s some kind of a diagram of a pendulum. I’m just curious, how much of your music is riffing on these ideas, these academic or theoretical constructs, and how much of it is coming from you and just playing what you feel in the moment?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I’m pretty addicted to learning, I think. Of course it’s endless in music, whether it’s mathematical or theoretical or whether it’s cultural or whether it’s economical. There’s just... It’s endless, which is great. But I think that I spend about 50% of my time studying and then 50% of my time forgetting what I’ve studied and just exhuming in a way. Because I think if there’s too much of a disconnect between... Of course, purely academic music is very valuable and that it offers this really clear, example-oriented, study-oriented sonic document of an idea or a technique and to be honest, A 480 is kind of like that. It’s pretty nerdy in that regard. Not nerdy but just void of... People still trip to that music, but it's just, in the way that I presented it, it was a little more study-oriented.

Shawn Reynaldo

Well, I want to play something now from a piece you made called “VoxU.” Why don’t we hear some of it? It’s another very long piece. In fact, you performed it just the other night right here at the Funkhaus before Tim Hecker, and I’ve cut out a couple of excerpts from a very long piece so let’s listen to this and then we’ll get into the ideas behind it. This is again, “VoxU.”

(music: Kara-Lis Coverdale – “VoxU”)

[applause] Again that was “VoxU.” A piece that you created I think initially for the MUTEK Festival in Montreal, and it has a very specific idea behind it. Maybe you can tell us about that.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, I wanted to explore the origins of vocal synthesis because that’s a pipe organ technology. And so the vox humana, it’s a stop. So a stop, you can think of it as a synthesizer preset. Or like a fixed tone that’s linked to a pipe design. And it’s a reed pipe organ stop that has an oscillating component and then a cylinder which is a tremulant that moves just in front of the blowhole, so it creates this... When it spins and you activate the tremulant it creates that mechanical vibrato that creates those cyclical beats in the music. So, of course, the beats change according to pitch, so there’s only certain pitches that work together so that the beats align in ways that aren’t total deconstructed craziness. So that was fun to figure that out. But I went around I sampled ten different libraries and created ten different libraries from vox humanas and figured out how they work and looked at different instruments and then put it together into this choral work, I guess you could say.

Shawn Reynaldo

And the vox humana, doesn’t it date back to the 15th century?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yes.

Shawn Reynaldo

It’s interesting to think people think of synthesis and music technology as these inherently modern pursuits, but I think it’s a recurring theme in your work that you’re interested in the history of music technology, and demonstrating that this stuff goes back way longer than 20 years ago or even 50 years ago.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, for sure. People think of Siri as a new thing but this is like a vowel-oriented Siri, I guess you could say.

Shawn Reynaldo

So, when you’re doing a piece like this which has a very specific historical inspiration, where are you in a piece like this? How much of this is your personal expression and how much of it is, let’s say, an academic exercise?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I think I’m all over it really. Maybe in the arrangement and just the way I write it out I think. Mostly arrangement narrative and my own perspective on the topic is always there. Tends to be kind of dystopic actually. Even though it might be... “VoxU,” I found the technology kind of creepy to be honest. I mean, i’m not the first one to think that. Organists have historically given the boot to the vox hu, you can swap out organ stops quite easily... Not easily but you bring in a technician and they can replace sounds, so if you’re sick of preset four you can just bring in a new one or re-patch it or something, it’s the same idea. But it was laughed at generally, as this odd replacement sound, but I guess maybe that’s why I was drawn to it. [laughs]

Shawn Reynaldo

You really are an outsider.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah.

Shawn Reynaldo

It’s interesting you say that, because it’s funny to think about something from the 15th century being designed to replace something that humans were doing, and that story is continued with music technology. You think about the 808 and 909 were supposed to replace drummers and then became this totally separate thing. Do you feel like the history of music technology is something that’s important for understanding music in general?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Oh, 100%. I think it’s extremely important. It’s written into music composition, music playing, everything, since day one. You even look at the invention of the pianoforte, for instance, and what the dampener pedal did for music and how that basically gave birth to impressionism. A lot of romantic music, the softening of the palette and what that did for chordal abilities in the left hand, how it freed your hand from the keyboard. Just the advent of a simple dampener pedal. I think its very under-studied, under-considered.

Shawn Reynaldo

When people talk about your music, I feel like they use a lot of different words because it’s hard to describe. It’s not like, “Oh it’s hip-hop, oh it’s techno.” People say things like experimental or they say sacred music or they say choral music or stuff like that. What I’m wondering is... Or it’s avant-garde. How do you think of your music? Do you even think about in terms of categories? And what’s the appeal of making music in the form that you do, where you’ll make a piece that’s 22 minutes long sometimes?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I mean, I don’t really think too much about format or reception. I’m not like, “I’m going to make my trance record now or my...” You know I’m not going to... I mean I respect if someone wants to do that, sure, but I just would rather come across new combinations, in light of what I learned about what everyone else is doing. But I think I’m pretty omnivorous in that sense. I listen to all music and I think that there’s no inherent value, or no primacy and value that are in one music over the other.

Shawn Reynaldo

I remember one time we spoke before and you said that when you first met Tim Hecker one of the things that you guys bonded over is that you both love Drake.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, it’s true. That was a Canadian connection I guess.

Shawn Reynaldo

I’m sure there’s some noise people that would really hate to hear something like that, but for you, is it not a different category?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I mean, I think that it’s weird when people say they hate a music because then you’re saying you saying hate a whole group of people. And I just think that’s really violent. I don’t know.

Shawn Reynaldo

Speaking of not adhering to the rules, I want to play something that you put out last year and it’s called Grafts, and it was essentially a 22-plus-minute piece that came out, and even that is an interesting act in and of itself, being that long. Let’s hear a little bit. Again, I’ve excerpted a few pieces because we can’t play all 22 minutes, so let’s hear a little bit of it and then we’ll talk about it.

(music: Kara-Lis Coverdale – Grafts)

[applause] That was Grafts, it came out last year on Boomkat. Oddly enough, even though it was this 22-minute piece, I would say it was your most critically acclaimed thing that you have put out to date, and it got accolades from even a lot of the DJ world and stuff like that. And then the record came out and you didn’t really talk that much about it, there wasn’t a lot of interviews. I feel like people don’t really know that much about this record. So can you tell us what was the inspiration behind “Grafts?”

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Grafts was something I wasn’t really expecting a lot of people to listen to I guess. Shlom from Boomkat wrote me and asked if I would like to do a one-sided LP as part of a special series Boomkat was doing. And I’m a really big fan of Boomkat so I decided yes, and I had this piece that I had made four months prior, a rough cut at the time. But it came from... I guess it was a really personal piece of music but, yeah, then it came out and people were listening to it, it was a strange phenomena.

Shawn Reynaldo

Is the fact that it was a personal record, is that what contributed to you not really doing a lot of press around it?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, I didn’t think that... I don’t know.

Shawn Reynaldo

You don’t have to tell us now, you can keep the secret if you like.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Not necessarily, it’s just that the way that it was part of a series. It wasn’t a proper album per se. It was a one-sided LP, it was only 22 minutes of music and kind of three pieces, it came out of me sitting down for 8 hours straight and that was it, that was the music. A really late night thing. I often work on nocturnal songs, and it came out of one session, even though I worked on it a long time after fine tuning it.

Shawn Reynaldo

One thing I wanted to ask about, sort of related to not doing the normal press cycle is that you’re an artist, you don’t do traditional releases, you don’t conform to traditional genre barriers but you seem to be constantly touring and playing around the world at festivals. You have lots of commissioned pieces that different cultural institutions ask you to do. Sometimes, when you put out a record, you talk about it in the press, sometimes you don’t, but you don’t really seem that concerned with the usual cycle of the music industry, but you’re still finding a niche. Is that something that you’re consciously pursuing, to try and stay out of that cyclical, album cycle rat-race that a lot of artists seem to be stuck in?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I just feel that it’s really difficult to stick with something, in terms of... The press is so slow to catch up with what I’m doing and then I feel like it’s so much work to be updating all the time, and I’d rather just be making music. But it’s something I think you have to get a hold of, and learn how to deal with, the media also. You have to get used to the multiple interpretations of your word and how common discourse can inflect or paint over your own experience in ways. I just feel like for a few years there it was a constant battle with the media and it was exhausting so I was like, “Forget it,” at a certain point. But that was a few years ago now, so I’m ready, I think, to re-approach that.

Shawn Reynaldo

And what about with shows? Because it’s not like the new Kara-lis Coverdale record comes out and then it’s like, “Oh it’s time for my European tour and that will be followed by my American tour and it’s all very structured and there’s a social media campaign that ties into it.” Yet, at the same time you’re always traveling and I’ll see, oh, you have a residency at this place in Europe or this place in Canada or wherever. How does it work with your live shows and planning that as a part of your career?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It’s been kind of a wild ride in the past while I guess. Like you said, it’s been a lot of different projects and a lot of different ideas and a lot of different everything. For a while my first huge tour, I was basically touring for two years and then I would find myself doing Elbphilharmonie one night in Hamburg, that beautiful new concert space. And then I would be doing Venster99 the next night, an anarchist pub in Vienna. It was really weird, up and down. But I think that’s just... It’s not an uncommon experience, I think, with musicians, but maybe it was a little more extreme in my case because I also don’t... I’ve been very resistant to having a manager and anything like that, and I like to do my own thing and make my own decisions. So if something interests me I just do it. Whether or not that’s a bad business decision I don’t know. It definitely made me very exhausted, so we’ll see for the next few years how it goes.

Shawn Reynaldo

Were going to open it up to questions pretty soon but I wanted to end by playing something new that you’ve brought in. Can you tell us about this piece? This is something that has not been released.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I wrote this in Paris, and I was coming off of a residency, sort of out of a residency with GRM. They’ve been very kind to me, and I don’t really need to say much else.

Shawn Reynaldo

Alright. Does it have a title?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It’s called “Flu glac_ru” right now but I code all my stuff in really weird ways so it’ll probably be called something else, or not, I don’t know.

Shawn Reynaldo

Alright, well let’s give it a listen.

(music: Kara-Lis Coverdale – “Flu glac ru”)

That was “Flu glac_ru,” maybe it’ll change, the title, at some point. Unreleased music from Kara-Lis Coverdale. I want to ask one last thing before we open it up to the audience. When you’re composing, there’s a lot of different sounds on there, we’ve heard a lot of different music. Sometimes there’s vocal bits, sometimes there’s piano, sometimes there’s organ, sometimes there’s something that’s entirely electronic. Where do you begin? What is your home sound or instrument? Is it on the computer? Is it on a piano? Is it on an organ? Is it something else entirely?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, either percussion or wind, for sure. Never really strings. Usually percussion or wind.

Shawn Reynaldo

It’s interesting you say percussion, just because there’s not a lot of drums.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Well, piano is a percussion instrument.

Shawn Reynaldo

Well, now you’re out-nerding me on music. Fair enough. All right. Well, let’s have a hand for Kara-Lis Coverdale. [applause]

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Thanks.

Shawn Reynaldo

If anyone in the audience has questions, they’ll come to you with the microphone.

Audience Member

Hi.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Ciao.

Audience Member

Ciao. When you’re looking for vocalists, or searching for vocalists that are going to be in your works, what characteristics do you look for in their voice, in their opinions towards music and how they work and what works they’ve chosen to be in? What do you look for? You know?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I don’t look for a characteristic in the voice, that’s for sure. I think I look for some other type of resonance. It’s like a vibe you feel out. Most people I work with, there’s some connection, if you know what I mean.

Audience Member

Before you hear them sing, ever? Or is that after you’ve seen them perform or something?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It can be either before or after. But it’s usually on a human level, or on a level of just a shared vision of something, or a shared... You’ve gone deep in something, maybe separately, but you’ve both gone deep to that place and you can just feel that you’ve both been there. That kind of a connection. But that said, it doesn’t necessarily need to exist. Like with the Estonian work, with those singers, that was very, “Hi.” I met them on that day and it worked out really nicely, so it’s not necessary. But long-term collaborations are usually a little more human-oriented.

Audience Member

Have you heard the album Ramona Lisa by Caroline Polachek?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yes.

Audience Member

Hi, I’m Philip, big fan of Grafts. It was one of my favorite things in 2017. I’m sad that I missed the show in Cologne, and I wanted to ask two things, sort of about the structuring of the record, Grafts, because for me it’s really... It’s interesting in a way that it sort of hangs in the air. It has this serene calmness to it, but then there’s this perfect spot where the piece transitions into the next, but it sort of doesn’t. It feels inherently right and I wanted to ask you how you achieved that, because it’s hard for me to put it into words.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I think that just comes out of a form of... Just years of thinking and playing at the same time. It’s like playing is a form of speaking, because a lot of that work was just one take, like I said. There was three layerings that I re-went over. But it was more or less immediate. So those transitions are just me talking from one sentence to the next. It’s very real-time. It’s not me going through and deciding I want two-seven to go to six and then six to go to one and I need a cadence there before... You know? It’s just comes out.

Audience Member

So it’s more like...

Kara-Lis Coverdale

That’s a really bad answer.

Audience Member

It’s like an in the moment thing you would say?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

In Grafts, because it was such a letting, I guess you could say, more than something I was architecting for the sake of whatever. Some other external... I guess commission is the word. It was more of my own thing. Yeah, I guess it’s a real-time. Yeah. Difficult to place how that works.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

It’s a magical, musical thing.

Audience Member

My second question would be... I’m sorry if I’m taking too long. On Grafts, and on the new piece you played, I’ve heard you incorporating just playing pure scales up and down. Like, for example, I think in Grafts it’s in the third half, it’s like a pentatonic scale going up.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, Grafts is very modal.

Audience Member

Yeah, that’s what I was interested in, because I wanted to ask you if your interest in utilizing music technology and showing the bare-bones structures of it and taking these bits also applies to musical theory structures, because I feel like you’re using scales in a way that’s... Uses the scale as a whole, as an object, instead of just working in the frame of a specific mode or scale, which is very interesting to me.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, absolutely. Some scales fit different instruments better. You really have to adapt immediately to whatever instrument you’re using. It’s like being conversational with people in that regard, when you have to, “Oh, maybe this person can’t handle this right now, so I’m just going to close this other area of me.” I don’t know. Just being accommodating. That’s something I learned pretty early, I think, as a pianist. Also, for going to competition, for instance, you’re expected to show up and perform a really technically precise work on this new piano for the first time that is totally different than whatever you’ve worked on before, whereas a violinist shows up and just shreds on their own violin. But yeah, when you’re composing you have to consider the instrumental bias, always. And with organs, they’re all very different also. It’s a good gateway to get into that world of individuality.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

Hi. I’m Mira.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Hi Mira.

Audience Member

Thank you so much.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Thank you.

Audience Member

Really inspiring. I was wondering how you... When you work with writing down the music and the scores within, like the first one with the circle thing, do your ideas come from the score sometimes, or do you write them down afterwards just to show it to people? Or do you write them down for yourself? How does that thing work for you?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I have a really weird relationship with scores. I kind of hate them, but I love them. Like with these A 480 scores, I wrote them after I made the music. I rarely write music on the score first, almost never. So in that sense, I’m very much a child of playback, in the same way that composition was very contested in the keyboard era. Musics that were written at the keyboard, it was considered a crutch that you shouldn’t really rely on. You should just have your quill and write out your phrases and it’s more theoretically pure or whatever. But I’m the naughty version of our time, where I like to rely on input technologies, and then if I need to write it down after I’ll transcribe it out of that. But I think it makes for much more immediate music. But also I like to, on my albums at least, do back and forth procedures, so you’re writing a bit in more innovative ways, and then there’s also just moments of outpouring. I think it’s a little more like you grow further when you take a step back and write things down in the score, kind of mentality. Does that make sense?

Audience Member

Yeah. Is it mostly for yourself that you do it? Or is it for other people to understand it in a new way?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

No, I never do it for myself. It’s always for other people.

Shawn Reynaldo

Speaking of scores, there was an image I didn’t get to show today, but maybe we can pull it up. It’s, I believe image number five. Oh, it’s sideways. But anyways, you can see there’s a more traditional score or note thing happening at the top, then these circles... this is another image that I pulled off of Kara-Lis’s Instagram. I definitely did some deep lurking before today’s talk. Can you explain what’s going on here?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

There’s some medieval notation going on at the top, but then I’ve also decimalized it because I like doing those conversions. I’m really obsessed with converting numeral values into ratios that are digitally compatible. And then 16, 32, just classic value sequences, that also mirror digital and pipe organ technologies, I really like that overlay. I’m constantly working with that in my music. And my mother was a draftsperson, so I really like rulers and protractors. It’s also a nice way to illustrate ratio-based harmony, like, from Harry Partch’s work. I don’t know if anyone here knows that. But, yeah, this was just an exercise in ratios.

Shawn Reynaldo

No more questions from me. Anyone else from the crowd?

Audience Member

I have the microphone, sorry. Hello.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Hi.

Audience Member

I have a very practical question, actually. You said you travel around a lot and you go from different projects to others, so change the scenery or maybe also the bubble. How do you organize your ideas or inspirations that come along? Do you actually do that? Or do you just work? Actually, it’s kind of related to what she asked also. Yeah, do you collect ideas, inspirations...?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

I literally spit it out on the go. Like, if something comes I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just put that there.” And then it goes out immediately. Maybe that’s why I’m so addicted to producing in the immediate sense rather than on larger projects. Then, I guess in terms of organizing it’s just a lot of emails and writing in my... I have a black book. And my computer. Yeah.

Audience Member

Hi.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Hi.

Audience Member

I’m Susana.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Hi.

Audience Member

Thank you so much for your talk. You said that you are no longer using SoundCloud to listen to new music.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

How long? Oh, I don’t know.

Audience Member

No, SoundCloud.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yes. What about it?

Audience Member

I was wondering where are you lately looking for some music on the internet nowadays?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, I’ve gone pretty private, so I guess emails. I also like to meet people in real life now. I’m pretty adamant about that. Although there’s a few things I have going on where I knew about some music before, just through usually word of mouth or a friend of a friend or someone introduces themselves. People send me music all the time and I check it out. Yeah. I just don’t spend much time surfing SoundCloud as I used to, for better or worse.

Audience Member

Thanks.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Hello.

Audience Member

Hi. Yeah, thanks for your talk. I’m Tornike. My question was regarding when you do a piece inspired by folk chant or choir or any other choir or sacred music which is pretty canonic and has a lot of history to it, do you feel a responsibility to take it... When you make it your own thing, do you feel responsible for taking it somewhere else? How does it feel? Is it like a pressure in a way?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

That’s a really good question. This is a very delicate dance, because there is really a lot of weight there, and you have to be respectful. Absolutely. There’s been times where I’ve felt it’s been really necessary to be a little more radical. But I always have good reason, and I make sure that I can face-to-face say it to somebody who is informed about those traditions and cares about them. It’s not something I would do for LOLs, ever.

Also, when you’re an organist, you’re vetted for each space you perform in, so there’s usually resumes involved. These are really precious instruments. So there’s a certain degree of respect that always has to follow everything you do.

In terms of the works themselves, for instance, the gagaku, this is the most immediate example I can think of, the gagaku ensemble I was performing with as part of the [Tim Hecker] Konoyo tour. These musics are sacred musics that are meant to usher their afterlife sonics. The show, for instance, is a mouth organ that’s made by instrument masters that source these pieces of bamboo from the bamboo forest and spend months making these instruments. The sonic is meant to open the gateway between this world and the next world. And when we were performing the work in Tokyo, this amazing sound engineer, he’s just such a cool guy, Zach, I don’t even know his last name, but he came up after and he was like, “Oh, very intense.” And then when I started talking to him a bit more he got into how he was hesitant to even help us with the performance in the first... Not help us, but he needed to check out what we were doing with the gagaku, because it is such a special... You don’t mess with it really. Then, after he said, like, “I knew that it was the right... I was able to participate after I saw how you were working together.” Yeah, these are serious traditions and they’re serious practices. I mean, you’re talking about the ritual of life and death often. It’s not something you joke around about. [laughs]

Audience Member

Thanks.

Shawn Reynaldo

When you were working on the Estonian project that we heard, did you have to worry about appropriating your own heritage in a way? It’s weird to think about that, because you are Estonian, but at the same time you’re sort of an outsider to that culture.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Oh, for sure. I think about this all the time, it’s so trippy. Because the music that my grandparents brought to Canada is very much music of that time, which was another reason why I insisted that they bring me there to work on it, because I felt like my idea of being an Estonian was 50 years old. Then I’d be reinterpreting an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation. But in terms of appropriating, no. I don’t think I was appropriating, because I’ve been a participant and I was invited, and we worked together, literally on the whole thing. Appropriation would just be taking without having any business doing so. So, yeah, even when I’m traveling I don’t go anywhere I’m not invited. There’s simple procedures of what is appropriate and not. I guess appropriate is part of appropriation, and that’s probably...

Shawn Reynaldo

Someone has to email you first?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

No, I can reach out first. But, yeah.

Shawn Reynaldo

Does anyone else have any questions?

Audience Member

Hi. Joan.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Hi, Joan.

Audience Member

I have the impression that you read a lot of music theory books from your Instagram stories. Which one is your favorite one, or the latest one you’ve read?

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Lately, I’ve been into [Hermann von] Helmholtz on the sensation of tone again, I’ve been revisiting. Harry Partch, also been revisiting. I really like reading [Arnold] Schoenberg, [Karlheinz] Stockhausen is always inspiring, in his weird ways. Then, I really like the more creative radicals. I read a lot of Glenn Gould, across the board. Even though it’s not really theoretical per se, but I think he’s someone who really, in an interesting way, imbues his own personality with theoretical inquiry in a way that resonates with me. I read about architecture a lot. There’s The Soundscape of Modernity by Emily Thompson, it's excellent. She talks about how architecture can form ideas about modern sonic production. That ties into organ work also. Jonathan Sterne is a favorite theorist. That’s more philosophical, that’s history of technology, but that text has really changed my life. He’s a very generous and interesting scholar, also he works in Montreal. Yeah, those are some immediate examples.

Audience Member

OK, thank you.

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, no problem.

Shawn Reynaldo

Last chance.

Audience Member

Hi again. As you just mentioned architecture, I was wondering how do you think about form in your music? Do you take inspiration from other fields, or maybe...

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Yeah, form is such an interesting topic, especially in digital music, because you’re rendering objects so often. So I feel like you can talk about... I mean, form historically in music is talked about on this horizontal left/right trajectory in terms of arrangement of event. But now you can talk about form as being a point A to B, like in a distance-related orientation as well, and a 360 orientation, but in a finite space that isn’t necessarily moving left to right. Yeah, it’s a really exciting time to talk about that. But in terms of architecture, yeah, of course. I like to think often about the relationship between an instrument and the period in which the buildings, like this building for instance, the Nils Frahm studio definitely fits this, this architecture, you know, it’s like they’re made to be together or something.

What kind of architecture would fit my music? I don’t know. I think about goo a lot, and wood, also. But form is also a textural thing as much as it is a sequencing event. I think for modern producers, textures, like fabrics and that kind of stuff, can be really interesting to think about.

Shawn Reynaldo

Anyone else? All right. Well...

Kara-Lis Coverdale

Thanks.

Shawn Reynaldo

Thank you so much to Kara-Lis Coverdale. [applause]