In 2025, Kara-Lis Coverdale re-emerged after an eight-year absence from recorded music, and the sudden torrent of releases revealed just how much she had been building in the shadows. Her first full-length, From Where You Came, collected the fruits of years spent composing for choirs, chamber ensembles, modular systems, and the pipe organ, while also performing alongside figures like Tim Hecker and Floating Points. The album felt like a grand return—dreamy and panoramic—but its expansiveness sometimes buckled under the weight of reintroduction. More revealing were the two projects that followed. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever narrows its gaze almost entirely to piano, and Changes in Air only slightly widens its scope to organ and modular synth. Together, the pair function as a study in resonance, decay, and the afterlife of sound.

A Series of Actions is built around the piano’s paradox: its tones cannot grow louder once played, yet their dying breaths can be stretched, shaped, and shaded. Coverdale leans into this limitation, drawing out the vapor trails of each note and foregrounding the piano’s physicality—its wood, its pedals, its creaks. Pieces like “In Charge of the Hour” and “Lowlands” place the listener so close to the instrument that its mechanics become expressive material. On “Turning Multitudes,” with strands of Sakamoto, Ravel, and Satie in its weave, Coverdale seems to reach beyond the instrument’s highest key, capturing both the ambition and the impossibility embedded in the piano itself.

If Actions feels icy, remote, and crystalline, Changes in Air begins by melting that surface. Its first movement echoes the earlier album’s final chord, then opens into something warmer and more grounded. Designed around elemental “substrates,” the album invites metaphor more than explanation. “Strait of Phrase” behaves like sonar drifting through syrup; “Labyrinth 1” rotates like a suspended sculpture; “Boundlessness” anchors itself to a tactile, almost mundane clacking. Where Actions left vast space around a few glimmers, Changes in Air fills every corner with light.

Across all three of her 2025 projects, Coverdale pursues harmony not as static chord but as spatial event. She understands that when frequencies meet in the air, they create unplayed overtones—ghost tones, emergent harmonies. Much like her site-specific performances at Kraftwerk in Berlin or Braga 25 in Portugal, these records vibrate with unexpected resonances. Peel back the ambient haze of From Where You Came and you discover the sharper, more elemental machinery of A Series of Actions and Changes in Air—works that, in their restraint and refusal of ornament, may eclipse the album meant to be her “return.” Coverdale’s music in 2025 insists on confronting the limits of touch, reach, and breath: 10 fingers, two feet, 88 keys, and a world of sound found in what lingers after the note has died.