The PAN M 360 team is criss-crossing the entire MUTEK 2024 program, observing as many artists as possible during this 25th edition of its Montreal version. Keep up with our experts until Sunday evening, as no other MUTEK event promises such extensive media coverage!
For more or less a decade, the work of Ontario-born Kara Lis Coverdale, a classical organist with a passion for sacred music and converted to experimental ambient has been praised…. Increasingly important, her contemporary work has been broadcast in churches but also in electro-immersive contexts such as the Satosphère or the Akousma festival.For more or less a decade, the work of Ontario-born Kara Lis Coverdale, a classical organist with a passion for sacred music, has been praised… and converted to experimental ambient. Increasingly important, her contemporary work has been broadcast in churches but also in electro-immersive contexts such as the Satosphère or the Akousma festival.
In the context of New City Gas, this was less propitious, and had little to do with the quality of her music.
Other factors worked against her.
Sandwiched between Patrick Watson and Colin Stetson, her calm, airy music from the outset took a while to capture attention at New City Gas, part of the MUTEK 2024 Special Event.
The music lovers near the stage seemed to be listening, but the level of attention waned as one moved to the back of the huge discotheque. Admittedly, the audience had come to hear the male colleagues, and a minority knew their work from the start. Kara Lis Coverdale’s music demands sustained attention to reveal all its subtleties, and the conditions were not ripe for this.
So all the finely chiselled elements of this music, which is more horizontal than vertical – drone, ambient, sacred music, classical music, etc. – were less perceptible than they would have been in other places, with only the hushed ambiences and vaporous melodies, too delicate in a difficult context. In such a triple program, things would have had to get more rhythmic, harder and more dynamic for people to abandon small talk and start listening.
But that’s not what Kara Lis Coverdale is about. And so it wasn’t the best context for the wow effect. In the silence and total immersion of another evening, another room, another program, the same performance would have generated much more enthusiasm and congratulations. At last…. like mine, a few hundred pairs of ears were able to focus and recognize her very special talent.
