For crafters of ethereal, drum-less music there’s a fine line between producing passive content for a Spotify playlist of calming music to train AI to and something more profound. It’s a balance that Kara-Lis Coverdale always gets right. Depth, detail and a sense of subtle drama give her music presence beyond inert background.
Changes in Air’s opening track, ‘Strait of Phase’, begins with slow striding organ, a steady pattern imbued with delicate harmonic variation. Intensity rises, as if you’re leaning on the volume button of your playback device, amplitude creeping up almost imperceptibly. Gradually the harmonic movement flattens out to be punctuated by rivets of icy chords. Ten minutes in a bass note strikes like a clump of snow falling from a gutter. Chord and pressure change, everything slackens and sounds start flowing differently. It sets the pace for an album that pulls entire landscapes from details and subtle dynamics.
Recently, Coverdale has focused on music for film and theatre and writing compositions for soloists and large ensembles. Prior to May 2025, she hadn’t released a record since 2017’s Grafts. Since then, she’s released three. The first of those, the remarkable From Where You Came, fuses software and hardware synthesis with voice, acoustic brass, string and wind instruments to create a mystifying hybrid where the patterns of electronic, early music and nineteenth-century romanticism seemingly converge, its organically un-time bound effect reinforced through unexpectedly jazzy flourishes. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever meanwhile, stripped things back for a suite of spookily pretty piano solos. Both records are a reminder of how well Coverdale’s music is suited to the album format, she finds fathoms of variation and permutation within limited palettes.
Written at home using electric organ, modular synthesis and piano, Changes In Air feels closer to the intricate webs of pulse and texture Coverdale explored on Grafts. The record’s arrangements were influenced by five ‘materials’: wood, water, sun, glass and metal – something we can hear in the way these tracks seem to fluctuate in density. ‘Labyrinth I’ works in geometric shapes, staccato motifs creating Tetris-like structures. Befitting its name, ‘Boundlessness’ is more liquid: flows and trickles on piano rolling over slow, shifting currents. On ‘Oriri’, icicle-like drones give away to dripping piano, as though the music is thawing before our ears.
It sounds like we’re hearing Coverdale move her eyes, hands and imagination along these different materials while translating their contours, surfaces and actions into music. Changes In Air is subtle, almost ornate, but Coverdale whittles minute variations and intricate textures to discretely demand our attention. Encouraging us to actively notice rather than passively absorb.
