Kara-Lis Coverdale composes and performs musical works across acoustic and electronic mediums to create works that transcend reality. Driven by a devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Coverdale’s work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music rooted in the interlocking pathways of musical systems and languages. Steadfastly committed to developing and expanding her vivid understanding of music as an immersive, tunable, and listening world rich in emotion and sensitivity, she is heralded as “one of the most exciting composers in North America” (The Guardian), and named unique navigator of the digital frontier with an ease and emotive sensitivity “we cannot yet comprehend” (FADER), Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim.

Kara-Lis Coverdale has toured concert halls, festivals, and clubs throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia headlining and opening for acts such as Big Thief and Caribou. She has also performed in the Promises Ensemble with Floating Points, Shabaka Hutchings, Jeffrey Makinson, Hinako Omori, John Escreet, Lara Serafin, and Kieran Hebden. In 2018-2019  she toured as part of the Konoyo Gagaku Ensemble. Coverdale has received outstanding reviews for her solo performances in publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, and more. In 2016 and 2017, Coverdale performed over eighty shows in Europe, North America, and Australia, including performances that were “festival favourites” for Unsound, Semibreve, and Mutek.

Kara-Lis has written large new works for ensemble, theatre and solo instrumentalists, including Endocrine for Cello Octet Amsterdam, Marjamaa Laulud for opera, theatre, and dance (in collaboration with choreographer Russian Stepanov) by the renowned Estonian Vanemuine Theatre as part of ESTO 100, UNIXS for Avarus Ensemble, Soul of Numbers for Brussels organist Hampus Lindwall and Cory Arcangel, Pattern Language for Canadian violinist Christopher Whitley (recorded in Describe Yourself), Composite Matter for Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra and vocal ensemble Triskele, and Sol for Ludens Choir. Composite Matter and Sol implement her work in ratio-based tuning adapted from Kepler and Hans Cousto’s planetary harmonics, reinforcing and contextualizing Coverdale’s work in tuning systems. This work also informs the design and build commission of a tuned, resonating bronze gong sculpture based on Earth Frequency for permanent installation in the outdoor courtyard of the Science Museum in Montréal in 2025.

Pipe organ is a connective tissue throughout Coverdale’s opus, underpinning her spectral  understanding of sound and harmony. After a hiatus from the instrument for strict focus on electronic touring 2016-2018, she began to explore solo pipe organ performance internationally and has since premiered several new organ works including but not limited to, VoxU, a commission for Mutek Montreal (CALQ) that is centred around the unique sonics of the Vox Humana, the first record of vocal “synthesis” dating back to the 15th century presented at SAT, Diapason and the Temporal Variations of Fundamental Constants at First Presbyterian United Church as part of Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts Festival, Wood Has Memory at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, Shadow Encounter at the Berlin Jazz Festival at Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church live streamed on German National Radio, State, Form, Interconnectivity at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco,  Entireties at Future Stops Festival in Toronto’s Cathedral Church of St. James, and Eternal Frequency at Church Street United Methodist Church for Big Ears Festival in Knoxville Tennessee. Underlying these works is a spectral sensitivity tempered with animism and weavings of harmonic interjections, described by New York Times writer Jon Pareles as “elevated, disembodied contemplation, patiently celestial.”

In addition to her solo work, Coverdale has recently collaborated on studio recordings with Actress, Yasuaki Shimizu, Ulfur, she has recorded covers of works by Caterina Barbieri and Lyra Pramuk. She has collaborated with Philadelphia noise artist David Sutton (LXV) on their album Sirens (2015, Umor Rex) to explore disembodiment and fantasy in the digital age. Coverdale worked with light artist Bill Ham (The Grateful Dead) to create “Light Music” for the Großplanetarium in Berlin. She has collaborated with the collective Metahaven (Elektra), created a deep forest installation with visual artists Rich and Miyu in Mexico City, and has presented a live A/V collaboration with MFO (Marcel Weber). Coverdale has written scores with artist and writer Kara Crabb on several projects, including the writing of the score for Royal Jelly (a modern reworking of the Greek Tragedy Medea), and The Reproductive Life Cycle of a Flower.

Kara-Lis has created original scores for film including Physician, Heal Thyself (2023), winner of the Vancouver International Film Festival Winner Audience Award, Carpet Cowboys (2023) and To Use A Mountain (2025).

The restorative potential of music and sound is an essential tenet of Coverdale’s driving instinct in her work. She has a series of durational immersion works written specifically in consideration of sauna architectures; the first for the floating Skarven Sauna outside the Oslo Snøhetta Opera House, and the second an installation for Washington Baths, a public sauna in Portland, Maine designed by Kiel Moe. She has also written breathwork music for Open, and composed a library of music for psychedelic therapy that lives within the Wavepaths music system, in technical collaboration with software designer Robert Thomas. Her explorations in quantum music (“Primary Actions at a Distance”), which uses quantum principles and instrumentations as a metaphor for cause and effect nature of our actions within emotionally connected communities, are part of the LAS Quantum sound lab exhibit at Kraftwerk Berlin (2025).

Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), whilst rooted in a modal sensibility, explores the impermanence of identity signature to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic approach to ratio-based microtonality and overtone, grief, love, and the passing of time. Coverdale’s recordings are architecturally considered and often understated, but her dynamic live shows can be unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, confrontational—symptoms that the artist is emotionally present— for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite as a highly dynamic and explorative artist; unpredictable and resistant to categorization and stasis.

Previous releases include Aftertouches (2015, Sacred Phrases), a distinct exploration of holographic sonics, container technologies, and digital ether, that explores music’s sacred histories while forging its mediated and culturally saturated frontiers. Extended harmonic resolutions of 17th century chromatic keyboard music are redolent of her approach to this part writing, voiced with hybrid keyboards, fractured samples, algorithmically rendered vocals, and VST miragery. Aftertouches was named a top album of the year by The Wire, NPR, and others, and the first acoustic performance of Aftertouches was premiered in New York City by Contemporaneous Ensemble as part of their “Day of Imagination” program in 2021, six years after its release; a testament to the accumulating, and enduring nature of her works. A 480 (2014, Constellation Tatsu), is a set of studies accompanied by .nfo scores sourced from the data-sourced voice to explore the sonic impermanence of identity signatures.

Kara-Lis was born in Burlington, Canada and began studying piano 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 through electronically mediated musics. 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 “promising young artist” award by Canadian new music composer Ann Southam, has held residencies with GRM Paris, EMS Stockholm, FUGA Zaragoza and others, is supported by the Canadian Arts Council, 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.