The gaze is still turned outward. This time, however, there is a stained glass window, in what appears to be the interior of a monastery, to capture Kara-Lis Coverdale's attention. The Canadian composer scores a hat trick and closes her personal triptych of the year with “Changes In Air”.
Five compositions, for as many phlegmatic mutations born with electric organ, modular and piano, which animate an album adapted from a work originally written for the installation in Skarven (in Oslo), i.e. a floating sauna heated by wood fire and mere solar radiation. Five, as well explained by the musician herself, are also the materials at the center of everything: wood, water, sun, glass and metal.
Composed, performed and recorded in Marquette (Montreal) in 2019, “Changes In Air” was then completed in 2025, and as with the previous “From Where You Came” and “A Series Of Actions In A Sphere Of Forever”, released after eight years of “silence”, the intent is once again to probe the apparent calm of a bucolic and “medieval” space, far from the anxieties of metropolises and a society hyper-accelerated. Very sweet piano scores then emerge and are immersed in very placid electroacoustic contrasts, often forming a mosaic of sounds that floods enchantment from all corners (“Labirint I”).
Like an old-time music box that turns along the strings of the soul (“Boundlessness”), Coverdale's touch is punctually enchanted and seems to tell us that time is just a detail, just as many of our fears remain superfluous. The scant eight minutes of “Curve Traces Of Held Space” condense the intentions in an ethereal sway of notes and background noises. It is the figure of a record that closes a circle in its own magical way, with which the post-minimalism of the North American composer has reached its own squaring of the circle, confirming her caliber as a poet outside of space-time, capable of dancing in the air like an angel fallen (obviously) from the sky.
24/11/2025
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
