#lia kohl

[dustedmagazine]

Dave Vettraino — A Bird Shaped Shadow (Ruination)

Dave Vettraino is a recording engineer based in Chicago known for his work with artists such as Jaimie Branch and Makaya McCraven. On A Bird Shaped Shadow, his acoustic guitar provides the matrix on which wind, brass, strings and percussion build compelling soundscapes. The result is an enchanting blend of jazz, classical, and even exotica and folk elements that defies categorization. The sound is warm, lush and highly detailed.

Somewhat gentler and more layered than Vettraino’s solo debut, Exercise (2020), this release — named for a line from Haruki Murakami — features slow to mid-tempo tunes that tend to unfold without building to obvious climaxes. The musicians who help him bring his compositions to life, including Rob Frye of the Bitchin’ Bajas (among other projects) on clarinet, flute, and sax, cellist and sound artist Lia Kohl and percussionist Phil Sudderberg, are well known on the Chicago scene.

The tunes, presented in order of increasing length, gradually draw the listener in. The brief opening title track sets the mood with a swoosh of strings and guitar suggestive of a sunrise. Next, “Morning Melody” — the theme of the first half of the day is also reflected in the album’s cover art — with sax and strings dancing over a steady percussion groove, seems to form a kind of suite with “Parallel Play,” which features singer-songwriter and composer Macie Stewart on Wurlitzer and violin and a similar groove and feel.

“Mid Mind” largely dispenses with the groove in favor of an exotica-adjacent sound in a perfect blend of synthetic and acoustic sounds. Vettraino’s guitar is somewhat more prominent on “There Is No Way Not to Choose,” which delivers seven minutes of sonic bliss also shaped by strings and spare piano.

The percussion groove returns on closer “Uplift Two Twenty Two,” which, over more than eight minutes, serves as the summation of what has gone before. Propelled by a sweet horn ostinato and a keening flute, the track is suggestive of heading out into the bustle of a morning in the city.

While this album is distinctive, I hear similarities to, among other things, some of the projects released on the Hubro record label, the Henry Kaiser-Jim O’Rourke project Acoustics, and, Peter Walker’s Rainy Day Raga and Second Poem to Karmela. Whether Vettraino is familiar with or interested in these antecedents is unclear, but A Bird Shaped Shadow will certainly appeal to anyone who is. Putting this record on, pouring a cup of coffee, and sitting by a sunlit window are an almost certain recipe for a nice day.

Jim Marks

[musicollage]

Macie Stewart + Lia Kohl – Recipe for a Boiled Egg. 2020 : Astral Spirits.

! acquire the album ★ attach a coffee !

[album-a-day-project]

9/1/24

Lia Kohl

Normal Sounds

====

Really cool concept album. Each of the tracks has a theme 'Plane, Ice Cream Truck, Car Alarm' and she's playing the cello around these. She must have taken a sound recorder with her to collect these sounds and then create compositions. I really enjoyed listening to this.

8/10

[sofysis]

Lia Kohl – The Ceiling Reposes (2023)

Now touch the air softly / swing gently the broom / I’ll love you ’til windows / are all of a room; / and the table is laid, / and the table is bare, / and the ceiling reposes / on bottomless air

William Jay Smith, “A Pavane for the Nursery” (1954)

[wildoute]

[culturedarm]

Lia Kohl seems eager to relinquish at least some of her secrets on Normal Sounds, where field recordings accentuate the mundane while harmonising with cello overtones, saxophone and other instruments.

https://culturedarm.com/lia-kohl-normal-sounds/

[wongsun]

Normal Sounds | Lia Kohl

[diz-cover]

Lia Kohl Normal Sounds 2024

[beginningspod]

It's time for Beginnings, the podcast where writer and performer Andy Beckerman talks to the comedians, writers, filmmakers and musicians he admires about their earliest creative experiences and the numerous ways in which a creative life can unfold.

On today's episode, I talk to cellist and composer Lia Kohl. Growing up in the Bay Area, Lia began playing the cello when she was eight-years-old and is trained as a classical musician. However, after moving to Chicago in the early 20-teens, she began improvising and making her own music. Her first full album Too Small to be a Plain was released in 2022 on Shinkoyo, which was followed by The Ceiling Reposes in 2023 on American Dreams Records, and her latest Normal Sounds is out now on Moon Glyph records, and it's wonderful!

(Photo by Leah Wendzinski)

I'm on Twitter here and you can get the show with:

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[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Jordan Martins

Jordan Martins is a musician, organizer, educator, and visual artist whose works have been shown in Chicago and Brazil. While he has played steel guitar and other instruments for years with the singer / songwriter Angela James, his first solo album, Fogery Nagles, was released by the Astral Spirits label in the fall of 2023. In his review for Dusted, Bill Meyer wrote, “Fogery Nagles arrives, seemingly out of nowhere, but just at the right time.”

Sarah Davachi — Cantus Figures Laurus

I’m a sucker for long-form droney music in general and as of late I’ve been bathing in organ music of this kind as much as possible. I had really enjoyed Davachi’s other works but fell fully under her spell with this box set of works from the last few years with over four hours of heavy tones unfolding in various ways. I like to listen to this as loud as possible to feel these sounds as vibrations. There are several shorter tracks that focus on a particular palette or tonality, with the later tracks being from live recordings of longer performances. Even though the set is a compilation joining these sets of works together after the fact, I love this body of work as a sequence of experiences.

Caetano Veloso — Araça Azul

It’s hard to pick a favorite Veloso record, but if I had to it would be the utterly unique Araça Azul, recorded in 1972 when he returned to Brazil after being exiled by the military dictatorship years prior. The record is markedly outside of the original zeitgeist of the Tropicalia movement — less ecstatic, hopeful, collaborative, and postmodern in the mixing of styles — but at the same it’s maybe the purest expression of the experimental range of sounds and poetry that the movement ushered in. There are other musicians playing on some tracks, but the whole thing feels like a single creative brain tinkering with ideas and sounds until they take enough shape to be a “song.” There’s a fundamental collage approach that I love — where he engages in field recordings, musique concrète, dissonant orchestrations overlapping on simple folk melodies, and transformative and ballsy covers of classics by singers like Monsueto and Milton Nascimento.

Angelika Niescier, Savannah Harris, Tomeka Reid — Beyond Dragons

I had the good fortune of seeing this trio play at Elastic in Chicago this past spring. When they finished their set, my wife leaned over to me and said “THAT WAS HOT SHIT” which is maybe the most accurate thing to say about these players and this music. Niescier’s compositions are somehow tight and specific while simultaneously giving each player ample room to flex and explore with abundant space around the components of each piece. I love their ability to charge into a piece full steam with an almost aggressive sense of urgency and then allow their interactions to gradually fragment and dissolve into textural interplays and quiet call-and-response improvisations.

Paul Franklin— solos on “Together Again”

A friend hipped me to a video of Paul Franklin soloing over the Buck Owens classic “Together Again” and I’ve since gone down YouTube rabbit holes watching as many clips as I can find (and I see other people in the comments on the same journey). Franklin is a Nashville legend who has played pedal steel on hundreds of recordings since the seventies. As a member of the Time Jumpers, he plays as a sideman to Vince Gill at local venues in Nashville covering classic country songs, often playing this tune which originally featured Tom Brumley playing a quick steel solo that used some very innovative voicings at the time. Franklin’s playing is so technically brilliant, but it also illustrates the ways in which the instrument can be psychedelic and disorienting, even in a conventional setting. His solos always follow a basic architecture but there’s subtle variations, improvisations and flourishes in every version where you can see him trying to find new ways of cracking it open. My favorite clips are the ones where he goes out on a limb and the audience is noticeably giggling as they experience the sonic floor drop out from under them like they’re on a carnival ride.

Nicholas Britell— “Unto Stone We are One”, funeral “March Song of Ferrix,” season 1 finale of Andor

I sometimes dabble in the questionable array of new Star Wars projects and absolutely loved Andor’s vision of a bureaucratic fascist space empire, not spending a second on jedis and lightsabers, instead examining the interrelationships of imperial occupations, military contractors, and resistance movements. The last episode is masterful in part because the tension of the entire season simmers to a boil during a funeral procession with working class miners playing junky space orchestral instruments. The score of this funeral march by Nicholas Britell is a haunting, yearning motif that steadily builds but the stroke of genius is how perfectly out of tune the instruments are! Such a simple and surprising choice does such heavy lifting in terms of adding a sense of materiality to the setting and imbuing the dramatic build up with a subtle unease beneath the gorgeous arrangements.

Terry Riley— Music for The Gift

A very early work by Riley experimenting with tape loops, with an approach that is uncannily prescient in the way it does a live remix of a jazz quartet as they improvise around tunes. The fact that this particular quartet was Chet Baker’s (with trombonist Luis Fuentes, drummer George Solano, and bassist Luigi Trussardi) is a surprising interlocutor in all of this: it would maybe seem more fitting to for this to involve an unorthodox voice rather than a more straight ahead, idiomatic jazz player for these out-of-the-box experiments. But I think the music works precisely because of the nimble-swinging of the group as Riley cuts up and repeats their melodies and phrasing back onto them in a slurry of loops that piles up and interacts with their improvising in unexpected ways. The clarity and charm of Baker’s playing is a perfect fit. Peter Margasak wrote a great piece about it for Sound American that you can find here.

Macie Stewart and Lia Kohl— Recipe for a Boiled Egg

Two of my favorite improvisers in Chicago. They are so emblematic of what I love about the creative scene here in the ways that they endlessly collaborate across a range of genres and scenes, whether improvising or composing, playing songs or deconstructing forms. This is a biased pick because they recorded this at Comfort Station, the small and idiosyncratic multidisciplinary art space I run in Chicago. The thing that first drew me to Comfort Station was the building’s unique vibrant acoustics and the porousness of sound that you get with an old building directly facing a busy street. Macie and Lia lean into that context in stunning ways on this recording, narrowing in on their voices and their bowed instruments reverberating and inviting in sounds from the outside world instead of recording in the controlled environment of a studio. You can hear ideas take shape as each listens, responds, builds, grows, dissolves into the other’s playing, with a recording quality that grounds them to a particular time and place.

Olivier Messiaen — “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,” from the Quartet for the End of Time

This is probably the single most impactful and cosmic piece of music I’ve ever encountered. Messiaen wrote all the movements for the Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a Nazi POW camp, and the entire work is on another level. But the sixth movement — just piano and cello — brings me to my knees every time I hear it. The first time I heard it was somewhat random and personal: during my freshman year of college, my mom was coincidentally the staff accompanist at the conservatory of the university I attended. And I would often borrow her car to run errands while she was rehearsing with music majors preparing their senior recitals. On one such occasion I was tip-toeing back into her studio to return her keys and heard a bass player (bass majors often adapt cello pieces for their senior recital) bowing the opening notes of the melody which seems to ask for a dissonant response from the piano. Instead, I heard my mom play the slow, pulsing major triad chord that entered in response, settling the piece into a hypnotic journey. I felt like the floor gave way in an instant and I had never experienced anything like it. Susan Alcorn has adapted it for solo pedal steel in a really unique way melding the harmony and melody together, and Atomic included it on their 2018 release of covers, Pet Variations, playing with deep restraint that the piece calls for while also letting the energy bubble up restlessly.

Jeanne Lee — Conspiracy

It’s hard to find a better expression of vocals and poetry integrated into a free jazz setting than this brilliant 1975 record, with Jeanne Lee leading a killer ensemble including Steve McCall and Sam Rivers among others. I had never heard Lee’s work before coming across this album when it was re-released by Moved-by-Sound in 2021 and I was struck by how much sparseness there is (somewhat similar to some of Caetano Veloso’s delicate moments on Araça Azul even), and how simple utterances give way to grooves and freakouts with the rest of the players wrapping around Lee’s command of the sonic space. If I’m being honest, I think these kinds of approaches to free form improvisations can often collapse into a kind of cheesiness or ham-fistedness, and this record NEVER once gets close to that, everything feels so purposeful even when the exploration is at its outer limits.

Olaibi — Mimihawasu

Although I had heard her playing on works by Japanese band OOIOO, this is a musician/project that I hadn’t heard of by name until someone I follow on Instagram posted that they had passed away this October (coincidentally on my birthday). Something in the way they eulogized her touched me deeply and I listened to all of her records in the days after (and often since). Maybe it is because my exposure to her music was immediately tied to her recent death, but there’s something so profound, tragic, beautiful, frail, intimate and loving about her music all at once. I wish I had heard her more before her passing, but I’m grateful that in the wake of her death this world of sounds has entered my life.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Plaid Live Show Preview: 1/10, Sleeping Village, Chicago

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Tonight at Sleeping Village, electronic music legends Plaid will finally grace the stage after their show in August was postponed. The duo of Andy Turner and Ed Handley are a little over a year removed from Feorm Falorx (Warp), their 10th studio album, and they should play lots from it in addition to other records of theirs from the 2010s, including underrated and dramatic 2019 effort Polymer. Feorm Falorx is a concept record about a concert at the fictional Feorm Festival on the fictional planet Falorx, but you don't need to know that to appreciate its beguilingly anachronistic sounds or Plaid's generally otherworldly mixture of classic IDM/techno and ambient experimentalism.

Opening for Plaid is the trio of Whitney Johnson (Matchess), Macie Stewart (from Finom), and Lia Kohl. Abstract Science DJs spin before the show, between sets, and after the show. Tickets are currently sold out, but there may be a few available at the door, so don't give up yet! Doors at 8:00 P.M., show starts at 9.

[garudabluffs]

Avant-garde cellist Lia Kohl builds resplendence with radio static on The Ceiling Reposes

On her new solo album, The Ceiling Reposes (American Dreams), Kohl builds songlike, borderline ambient instrumental compositions that incorporate radio broadcasts she recorded while staying on Vashon Island, just off the southwest coast of Seattle. She frames each fragmentary sample so that even the static feels like a living part of the lush, tranquil, gradually evolving music, and the radio recordings mesh with the other material so well that you might wonder if they weren’t also somehow responding to her. Kohl fleshed out the album with a small symphony of instruments she played herself—cello, of course, plus synthesizers, kazoo, wind machine, piano, drums, bells, and concertina.

[jdunlevy]

There’s a lot of great writing here in this, the return of The People Issue to the Chicago Reader after a break since the 2016 People Issue.

I did a lot of work on the online formatting and navigation for this one—with a lot of trial and error in a very short time. I think it came out well and properly showcases the writing, the photography, and the people featured:

The Movement Builder: Richard Wallace

The Diversity Advocate: Asafonie Obed

The Dance-Music Matriarch: Natalie Hill

The West-Sider: Denise Ferguson

The Punk Musician: Jill Lloyd Flanagan

The Cheesemonger: Alisha Norris Jones

The Protector: Tamar Manasseh

The goddess of WOW: Lynne Rousseau McDaniel

The Avant-Garde Cellist: Lia Kohl

The Touring Musician: Izzy Reidy

The Socialist: Vicko Alvarez

The Intergalactic Funk DJ: Zeetus Lapetus

The Comics Artist: Caroline Cash

The Voice: Mario Smith

The Moviegoer: Nick Obis

The Curator: Malia Haines-Stewart

The Tailor: Julia Needlman

The Auteur: Tony Trimm

The Champion: Karla Estela Rivera

The Kink Performer: Wildcat Shadow

The Icon: Remembering “Mama” Gloria Allen

Updated July 26, 2023: The People Issue was recognized with the first-place win for Special Section in the 2023 AAN Journalism Awards.