For most of the last decade, Kara-Lis Coverdale’s reputation seemed to outpace her discography. After 2017, her recorded output went quiet, even as her practice expanded outward—into sound-bath installations, ensemble work with Floating Points and Tim Hecker, commissions for choirs and chamber groups, and a deepening relationship with the pipe organ. When new music finally arrived in 2025, it didn’t arrive gently. It arrived in a rush. From Where You Came, her first full-length in years, attempted to gather all of that activity into a single statement, its soft, digi-orchestral haze functioning as both reintroduction and résumé.
But it’s the two projects that followed—A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever and Changes in Air—that feel most revealing. Where From Where You Came occasionally buckled under the weight of summarizing a long absence, these records thrive on limitation. They sidestep the question of legacy entirely, focusing instead on sound as an event in space, and more crucially, on what happens after that event is set in motion.
A Series of Actions is devoted almost entirely to solo piano, but it treats the instrument less as a melodic vehicle than as a resonant body. A piano note cannot grow once it’s struck; its life is defined by decay. Coverdale leans into that fact, shaping music from the long tail of each sound rather than its initial impact. The album feels uncannily physical. You hear the mechanisms at work: the pedal engaging, the wood flexing, air shifting around the strings. On “In Charge of the Hour,” the press of the sustain pedal becomes a compositional gesture. “Lowlands” places the listener somewhere near the floor, catching the soft wheeze and creak of the piano’s undercarriage—sonic details that recall childhood lessons as much as avant-garde experiment.
The pieces move slowly, but not aimlessly. “Turning Multitudes” gradually knots together faint impressions of Ravel, Sakamoto, and Satie before straining toward a pitch just beyond the keyboard’s reach, as if testing the piano’s physical limits. The record ends in a way that feels unresolved rather than concluded, its final tones bleeding directly into Changes in Air.
Where A Series of Actions is austere and brittle, Changes in Air is warmer, more enveloping. Expanding the palette to include organ and modular synthesizer, Coverdale builds a single, luminous drone divided into five movements. Each is loosely tied to an elemental material, though the connections are suggested rather than explained. “Strait of Phrase” pulses like sonar slowed to a syrupy crawl; “Labyrinth 1” seems to rotate in place, suspended from an invisible axis. “Boundlessness” grounds itself in a faint, rhythmic clatter, a reminder that even the most expansive drones are anchored to touch and repetition. Structurally, the album flips its predecessor inside out: where A Series of Actions dotted silence with isolated sounds, Changes in Air fills the frame completely, bathing everything in light.
Coverdale has described this body of work as an exploration of harmony in space, and that description fits not just these records but her year as a whole. Overtones—frequencies that emerge when sounds collide—are everywhere here, audible even when no new notes are being played. In contrast to the gauzy reassurance of From Where You Came, these later releases are sharper, tougher, and more exposed. There’s no hiding behind atmosphere, no leaning on prettiness.
To sit at a piano is to confront constraint: ten fingers, two feet, a fixed span. Rather than fighting those limits, Coverdale listens to them, shaping music from their edges. What emerges isn’t grand or declarative, but patient and exacting—sound that insists on being felt in the moments after it seems to disappear
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