Kara-Lis Coverdale: Solo Organ

Thursday, March 21st, ISSUE presents artist and electronics visionary Mark Fell, returning to ISSUE for the first time since 2015 to premiere an untitled new piece with cellist, composer, and improviser Okkyung Lee. The evening also features Kara-Lis Coverdale and LXV, collaborators on joint album Sirens, each presenting new solo work.

For this special performance, Kara-Lis Coverdale performs new solo work exclusively on the pipe organ at First Unitarian Congregational Society, a Hutchings organ registered with the New York City branch of the American Guild of Organists. Driven by a patient devotion to space, Coverdale’s compositions exist between erudite computer music and acoustic melancholy, seen in her hybrid organ and piano works mediated by electronics and digital interfaces. Coverdale is a classically and academically trained musician with a Masters degree in musicology and composition from Western Ontario University and has worked as an organist at Montreal's St. John Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church. She has since collaborated with artists including Tim Hecker, specifically contributing to his acclaimed albums Virgins, Love Streams, and Konoyo. Her praised album Grafts, recently released on Boomkat Editions, is described as “uncompromisingly distinct while redolent of modal minimalism, 70s, new age, and folk music, hovering in the half-light between acoustic and electronic refinement.”

Kara-Lis Coverdale was born in Burlington, Canada, and began studying with the Royal Conservatory of Music from age 5. Her grandparents were immigrants from Estonia. She later went on to complete with degrees in musicology and composition, for which she wrote a Masters thesis “Sound Rhetoric, and the Fallacy of Fidelity,” a seed to Coverdale’s infatuation with the mutability of the real. Coverdale has worked as organist and music director at several churches across Canada since age 13, where she has also served as choir conductor. She is recipient of a “remising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, and presents original performances, commissions, collaborations, and installations all over the world including The Barbican, Theatre du Chatelet, AGO, MAC Montreal, Filharmonia Krakowska, Teatro Circo, Kraftwerk, and Elbphilharmonie.