Kara-Lis Coverdale

Part I: PICL (Pieces in Caps Lock)

Kara-Lis Coverdale Part I: PICL

Kara-Lis Coverdale offers an intimate insight in her practice with a two-part project for 3hd Festival. The Canadian composer, musician and producer will first present an intimate solo piano concert followed by a conversation with journalist and music theorist Raphael Smarzoch, and later in the week an electronic concert showcasing her dense, virtually realized epics.

As two very different propositions, the aforementioned concerts, titled ‘PICL (Pieces in Caps Lock)’ and ‘Other Fantasies’, respectively, allow the artist to extrapolate on her work in the space between traditional acoustic composition and research-based modernism. Whereas Coverdale’s music for solo piano is compositionally restrained, exposing the delicately woven foundations of her sound world, the electronic portion is where this groundwork takes new life, re-formed and re-imagined into a colourful and otherworldly fantasy of her distinct own.

A trained conservatory pianist from childhood but also a modernist negotiating data-driven music forms, Coverdale collides traditional assumptions about concert music as a deep and cerebral genre versus electronic as the language of body and movement. Through her work, the artist argues these distinctions to be untenable in a world with a ubiquitous technological influence and consequent saturation, with synthetic instruments arranging our shared experiences into new forms of articulation.

In exploring the freedoms of a post-instrumental world while at the same time playing with its limits in the non-negotiable physical presence of an audience listening, Coverdale questions whether or not the piano is an artifact of human labour that, in her own words, “romantically champions inconvenience” while simultaneously living on in other new forms of the “keyboard.”

Kara-Lis Coverdale Part I: PICL
Artist Talk: Kara-Lis Coverdale and Raphael Smarzoch
Wednesday, October 12th, 8-10pm
Vierte Welt

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