This week, The Great Northern festival is showcasing winter-themed art and ideas from near and far. One of the musicians visiting Minnesota to perform is Kara-Lis Coverdale, a Canadian composer who specializes in organ, piano, and electronic processing. They’ll share music at Icehouse on Tuesday, Feb. 1 (tickets available online or at the door).

In “Grafts,” Coverdale’s most recent release, low electronic tones undergird shimmering una corda notes. “Undo,” the B-side, unfurls like a light snowfall. The music reminds me of winter: how glittering snow counteracts darkness and desolation. Coverdale has some fascinating insights on what makes a song sound “cold,” which she shared alongside thoughts on climate, ritual, her relationship to the press, and more.

You grew up in Canada and have roots in Estonia. Both of these places get serious winters, just like here in Minnesota. What comes to mind when you think of winter?

Winter is such a restful season. There's a sense of really calm isolation and solitude that accompanies the idea of the North that I really resonate with. I live in a forested area, and there isn't really anyone around, save my 90-year-old neighbor, who's a kilometer away. It's almost a painful silence sometimes, especially in contrast to the summer, when you step outside and it’s just cacophonous. When the winter comes, everything's resting and dead.

In [climates with harsh cold,] you need to prepare for winter — you have to change your tires, you have to get new clothes out, there's all this stuff that comes with needing to ready yourself for survival. I think it keeps people close to the bone. Besides that, there's sun deprivation and all sorts of emotional states that come with the cold. It takes a while to learn the ritual that surrounds northern climate. It certainly comes with many beautiful traditions and many ways to keep warm.

Where do you live right now?

I live in Valens, outside Hamilton, Ontario. It’s rural conservation land, and I grew up here. We're still at a relatively southern parallel — even [compared to] when I was living in Montreal, it's so subdued. There, you're dealing with negative 40 [ºC] on the regular, but here, you'll have streaks of negative 10. That's about it.

You mentioned some of these yearly traditions that accompany winter. The ideas of changing car tires and unpacking sweaters totally resonate for me. Can you think of any other winter traditions that stick out to you?

Well, we have a huge sauna tradition in our family. Almost everyone in our family has built a sauna. And in the winter, we cut holes in the ice and then dip in. It’s usually a six, seven hour commitment. You go out and stoke the fire for three hours before it's ready. And then you can go out and enjoy the hallucinogenic process of it all. Then you have to rest and have your food prepared. That's probably our most intense winter ritual.

We used to do a lot more snowmobiling and things like that. But these days, it's really hard to depend on snow being around for that long. It seems to fluctuate so unpredictably — it's not like 10 years ago, when you could keep a snowmobile out for like a week straight. Definitely a different climate.

It sounds like you have a direct relationship with the land. What else have you noticed about climate change?

We have a very direct relationship with the land, first of all. That's basically all we do: monitor what's going on outside. The weather is the first thing we talk about in the morning. I have a lot of farmers in my history, so it's in the tradition of my family.

Some things are cyclical, and it's difficult to parse whether or not it’s more of an Anthropocene-affected temperature change. [But] temperature change is something we all notice — the maple sugarbush season has moved forward almost a month and a half, two months. And a lot of urban people notice ski hills — you can't ski into April [or] May like you used to anymore.

It's difficult to observe, but the temperature is even lower when we come home, because we have the forest that creates this refrigerator effect. You come up the driveway, and all of a sudden there's snow everywhere. Swamps are like air filters and water filters, so you have different air quality here. I found this very painful when I used to travel a lot. Visiting places and [wondering], “How can you smell this every day?”

I'm still not sure how to solve such a big problem. I struggled for a while with the idea of being “conservative” but also progressive. I often found those culturally very at odds. [But] over time, your values become more pronounced. I've been leaning more and more heavily into conservation, [versus] working from the left to the right. Climate is everything, from my perspective.

I'm so glad to hear your thoughts on this, because I've noticed at The Great Northern, they pay a lot of attention to climate.

Yeah, it's a really interesting program they've put together, and I'm excited to be there for it, because I'm actually interested in all these things. Learning how to be one with your climate, rather than building yourself an imaginary box outside of it, is something that we should all think more about. Like, creating zero waste is something my mom taught me, and it is so hard at first, but it's very possible.

"How do you teach ways to enjoy discipline?" is something I think about a lot, because environmental security and environmental conservation is discipline, basically. It's a practice of restraint, and it's a practice of holding something, rather than changing it or trying to work it or move it to your whims. There's a lot of good work to be done there, for sure.

I don’t want to over-generalize, but I think something cultural about the North can be that discipline. Sometimes it might not be totally healthy — I'm thinking of my extremely stoic Norwegian great-grandfather, who could not talk about his feelings at all.

I'm so glad you brought up the stoic, emotional no-sharing. That's such a common mindset that comes with [the North], because when you're living an extremely conservative life, you need to cut wood in the morning. And you have no time for yourself. That's in contrast to a lot of self-oriented millennial culture and self-care movements and stuff that I think is really healthy and beautiful, as well. There's a lot of integrating to do there that will happen over the next decade and even five years.

Shifting to talk more specifically about music: I read an interview from 2016 where you were talking about how people characterized your music as beautiful. You said, “Cold and mechanical, I would say, is more my thing. But still, people think it's beautiful.” And I was really curious to hear more about that overlap, or lack thereof, between cold and beautiful. What does that look like for you?

 A lot has changed in my life since that period. I think a lot of my reaction to the press in that time, and people's observations of my work, had to do with overcompensating and trying to reorient stereotypes that I felt I was subjected to: the feminine as beautiful, and the feminine as soft. From the industry, I felt there was so much marginalization of my work. I literally had people say to me, 'There's already another electronic woman there, we can't have another.' In interviews, I was trying to show that I could be opposite of what they thought I could be, in order to survive and to make a living.

Obviously, [beauty] is something that I prefer to see in my worldview. But regarding "cold and mechanical”: There's a lot of emotional intimacy and vulnerability in my work. And articulating vulnerability and idea is different for me than articulating musical idea. At that time, I was articulating how logic-oriented my practice was. I didn't feel like I wanted to be personal about my musical expression with the press or the public, because I didn't think it was my responsibility. I still don't think it's an artist's responsibility. But it's about exploring these comfort levels, I suppose, with what gateway of your heart you want to open, or what corridor of your mind.

Speaking about temperature and beauty, there is aesthetic beauty that has formalized over time. You mentioned the stoic Norwegian grandfather and the craftwork and artwork that comes out of those states of mind. Clean lines.

He was a woodworker.

Yeah. It's very interesting how minimalist perspectives and mathematical structures can come out of those states — I do think that these are states of being. States are not permanent; they can change, like seasons. And then there's mental states of people who are completely unconnected with the seasons. I have explored that personally and found it very confusing.

I was wondering about your traveling during winter, because I assume you've been pretty much home over the past two years.

Yeah. I'd been traveling so much that it's been a great rest for me and a great way to recenter. [COVID-19] has been really challenging for everyone I know. But like, I don't really like airplanes, even. It's a lot of jetlag; exhaustion; pollution.

It's great to see everyone auditing what makes sense and what doesn't. Like, do you really need to go and do that? I was certainly doing a lot of things that I didn't need to be doing on an artistic level.

I have been enjoying the January playlist you have on Spotify. It seems like you've paid attention to songs and sounds that feel particularly wintery. And I was wondering if you can describe what makes sounds or songs sound “cold.”

I suppose it depends on whether you're inside looking outside, or you're actually outside. Because you can feel warm while observing coldness. Like, we just came out of Christmas, and Christmas music is so much about temperature. But that's mostly novelty-oriented word painting — like, in "Baby, It's Cold Outside," they'll have blue notes. Small moments of dissonance that articulate this discomfort.

In my personal vocabulary, I’ve found that in reviewing some of the more longform works I've made over the past three years, there's a certain pain that accompanies colder temperatures or colder structures. When you're very cold, pain is inevitable on a physical level. There's an indigo blue color that accompanies, often, those states. In particular, there's a shadow work that I wrote for the Hollow Tooth church in Berlin. It was for organ, and it was very high frequency-oriented and low frequency-oriented, so it was like a hollowed-out middle spectrum.

I've been doing a lot of painting lately on cold metal, and it creates this really cool cracked effect. I was happy to locate this method, because I've photographed a lot of heat points on lakes and water bodies. If you have a dark piece of stone or leaf that becomes embedded into the ice structure, and then it becomes sunny, the dark spot will melt first. And then it creates these insane fractal "antlers" that go out. There's ways to write those determined structures into melody abstractly. But there's a lot of really interesting poetic license to take, especially when working with digital musics and electronic music.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.