by Aly Eleanor (@purityolympics)
Every time you take a walk down the street, you’ll hear music. It won’t be catchy; it might not even be enjoyable. There is a constant symphony of anthropogenic sounds surrounding us, swaying to the wind’s rhythm. Chicago cellist and composer Lia Kohl is fascinated with these ephemeral clouds of noise, embracing and investigating them in her solo work, especially on her new record Normal Sounds. Strings and saxophone duet with car alarms and ice cream trucks; fridge drones harmonize in a choir of the mundane.
Post-Trash connected with Kohl (and her cat Mr. Soup) over Zoom earlier this month to talk about the new album, radios, improvising, poetry, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
photo credit: Leah Wendzinski
Aly Eleanor: What was your relationship with music as you were first discovering it? What were some of the first things that made you passionate about it?
Lia Kohl: Both my parents are musicians, which was a good start. I love music, but I feel like it's a bit more like the air that I breathe than a passionate relationship. When people ask me about my influences, I tend more toward poetry and visual art.
AE: That's an apt way to put it. It's not really something you think about. It's just as instinctual as breathing in and breathing out.
LK: That’s not to say that I don't love it and I don't think about it a lot, but in terms of artistic inspiration, I take it from everywhere, you know?
AE: Not to go on too much of a tangent, but who are some of your favorite poets? Not necessarily ones that influenced you as far as how you think of art, but ones that have had a profound effect on your life and that you’ve really enjoyed.
LK: I was actually just in New York last week working with a very old friend of mine who's a poet. Her name is Elizabeth Metzger. She has a couple of books out. She's wonderful — I find her poetry and her personhood to be very inspiring. I love Marie Howe and John Ashbery. Mary Oliver, everyone loves Mary Oliver.
AE: She was my first favorite.
LK: It's nice when people who were a first favorite continue that way, you know? It's easy to go up and be like “That's old news.” But Mary Oliver is not old news to me.
AE: Something I think is true with musicians and art in any capacity, but especially with the written word and poetry, is that you can grow with it. You'll read the same stuff that blew your mind when you were a teenager. It might be just as mind-blowing, but in a different way.
LK: Yeah, exactly.
AE: Thank you for abiding in the poetry tangent. What were your formative musical impulses, when you were realizing that it was becoming something so instinctual and essential?
LK: When I moved to Chicago a little more than ten years ago, I started improvising for the first time. I think that I improvised earlier in my life, but I didn't think of it as part of a practice. It was an extra thing or something I did with my mom. Taking improv more seriously was a really formative experience for me, the idea that I could make any sound on the cello and that composition happened in real-time and in response to people. That brought listening to the forefront for me instead of technique. I'm classically trained; there's a lot in that tradition about trying for a specific goal, whereas improvisation is emerging as it happens. Improvising brought a really different relationship to time and to listening and to conversations with other musicians I love, which sustains me.
AE: What stands out when you are listening? What do you find yourself exploring when you're in those improvisatory situations and reacting to what others are playing, engaging with the push and pull?
LK: Because listening and improvisation are responsive acts, I think it's wonderful to feel how different my responses can be in different situations. Playing with new people, I say different things; it's just like a conversation. I'm not going to say what I always say. I'm going to respond to you specifically. I say different things because of who I'm with and who I'm responding to with the same tools.
AE: Forgive the religious comparison, but it's almost like speaking in tongues. All of a sudden you find yourself able to communicate and respond with the same voice, but in different languages or different ways.
LK: I think that's a good comparison.
AE: When you're working on your records, do you listen differently than when you're playing with others?
LK: Because I am such a collaborator, I often find myself setting up situations where I have something to respond to. With [The Ceiling Reposes], that collaborator was the radio. I create collaborators for myself from the get-go. With this record, I'm responding to the recordings that I took and layering things on top, but I always started with the field recording. The recording is a collaborator. The world is a collaborator. I find it really difficult to sit down and make something out of the blue. I'm not someone who hears melodies in their head, I need something to respond to.
AE: The radio has been an integral part of your recent work. What drew you to it as a collaborator? Multimedia has been an element and influence, whether it's visual art or the radio. How has it been key to your explorations of sound over the last few years?
LK: My first interest in the radio is in that collaboration, a sort of chance possibility. There are so many possibilities within the radio. Obviously, what comes out of it, but also the signal itself. My friend Jeff Kolar and I are doing this installation that’s playing with the signal as a sort of physical object. We're using a bunch of radios and transmitting to them and the signal morphs. It becomes a sort of animal, which is so fascinating to me. I think the act of transmission is really interesting because it's in time and in space. I love things that point to the object-ness of sound, whether that's the physicality of the cello or the physicality of the radio and radio waves. It's kind of amazing to me that it's actually a physical thing, you know? It's not ethereal or imaginary. We are in space and time and hear these waves that make us feel things.
AE: With Normal Sounds, you're not removing sounds from their geography, from a certain time or a certain place. You're not removing it from its context, but placing it in a new context. Did wanting to create new juxtapositions, new contrasts, and new collaborators fuel the record, using even more sounds?
LK: Place is definitely important. I don't do anything to those recordings. I cut them up and I place them somewhere, but I think about the music around it almost like frames for these moments in space and time. I'm harmonizing, mimicking, and expanding upon these recordings. I’m thinking about framing moments in time, sometimes very elaborately.
AE: What caught your ear about these specific sounds? All the sounds that you use are perceived more like ambient smog instead of something to be listened to, like when a car alarm goes off down the street and you're trying to go to sleep and it forces you to reevaluate what it can be. What connects you with the sounds you used?
LK: There are two categories of sounds on the record. There are incidental sounds and more intentional sounds, but they're all human-made sounds that are not intentionally musical. I started with fridge drones; they can get loud and very resonant. There's a lot of frequencies in there. I was on tour and I started taking recordings of fridges in various places, like in the airport. Sometimes in the practice of making field recordings, you start recording sounds and you don't realize that it's a collection until you have a bunch of them. Once I started this collection, I started more intentionally listening for these kinds of sounds. Thinking about the self-checkout jingle — those are just synthesizers, but we're not thinking about them as music. Somebody made that sound, somebody decided that's what is going to happen when you're at Target and you're done placing your card. Somebody made that choice, but they weren't thinking about music at all. But I could make music out of it, and that would be interesting.
AE: It’s melody in the most abstract and capitalistic way.
LK: I like the idea of reframing those things and thinking about how they could be beautiful if we thought about them differently.
AE: It's encouraging more awareness of different sounds that aren't musical, that seem unmusical, but can be part of a kind of strange musical cacophony that we're kind of always surrounded by.
LK: Even things that are annoying, that sometimes you wish would just be silent.
AE: On Sunday mornings, my neighbors have a little hangout on their porch and they play random loud music. It started as a bother, but now it's something I look forward to, hearing what sounds they're going to make.
LK: I have the same relationship with my neighbor. He plays very emotional, romantic music with lots of strings. I imagine that they're either really in love or just fell out of love. He plays it for two hours with all his windows open and the volume all the way up. And I'm like, you know what, man? You’re in your feelings. That's cool, I'm into it. With my windows shut, it kind of sounds like vaporwave. I have so much affection for this man who I don't know.
AE: What has made certain sounds stand out? Do you think of it as more of a reevaluation or as an expanded field of awareness, growing more inclusive?
LK: When I was taking these recordings and making this collection, I was definitely extra aware. I was hyperaware in a similar way to when you carry a camera around, you’re more aware of things to take pictures of. That was already the way that I interacted with the world. I don't feel like it heightened my awareness. It’s more like I decided to make art about how I already am. I'm already hyperaware of sounds and now there's a record about it.
AE: Quote unquote “normal” sounds.
LK: The title was very tongue-in-cheek.
AE: There’s kind of a beautiful nothingness to that term.
LK: It’s so specific to my experience, in America and in Chicago.
AE: When you're going through the city, you hear a lot more of the nonstop ambiance of a heavily populated area. All these people, all these things that we've built. It's like a really dissonant, messed-up orchestra.
LK: Things are always moving.
AE: Given the playful way that you explore these sounds, from the title or mimicking an ice cream jingle or Patrick [Shiroishi] echoing and soloing over a car alarm, it’s easy to not think of them as humorous because they’re normally so innocuous, but then you reframe them and make them sort of funny.
LK: Oh, I'm glad that that's your experience.
AE: Is that always something that you want to have a sense of?
LK: I think the world is full of possibilities for play.
AE: With this record especially, you’re blurring the line between what is a sample or recording and what is something you performed. Was that something that happened by design?
LK: I'm really interested in being in time when recording. When you're recording a rock song in a studio, the point is to make something that's sort of evergreen, that always sounds like its perfect form. You don't want people to listen to your song and be like, oh yeah, I can hear the studio. This music is very much about time and place. I think in framing these recordings, I want it to feel like layers of time. Every layer that I add is an improvisation over a little snippet of reality, which becomes many layers of reality.
AE: You're not trying to drown them out, you’re trying to speak in harmony with these weird little honks and hums that we hear. What were some of the electronics you were playing with as you were manipulating these sounds? What was interesting you as you were crafting the non-field recording parts of the record?
LK: I use a Teenage Engineering OP-1 synth, which I got because it's tiny and powerful and I'm not interested in having any large gear to carry around. I already have a cello. I made some of the record at a residency in northwestern Wisconsin called ACRE and they have gear there. They had a funny old Casio, so some of the sounds are that. I think “Plane” has some samples of the little preset songs that the Casio has. Every time I hear that on the record, I'm like, that was a weird choice. I don't know about that.
AE: Using the preexisting sounds is another way of taking sounds from their time and place, keeping their context and just placing it alongside everything else.
LK: I'm not sure for what purpose, but they're in there. I'm not a big gearhead. There's not a lot more than the cello and synths.
AE: How did Patrick Shiroishi and Ka Baird end up being on the record? What drew you to them as folks that fit into this sound world that you've built?
LK: Patrick and I have been friends for a little while, and we've played together; he's just a lovely, lovely person and a great player. We have parts of a duo record somewhere deep in the files. I thought it was cheeky to put a saxophone on the track with car horns because saxophone kind of sounds like a car horn, you know? It's also one of my favorite instruments, so that’s not a dig. Patrick improvised over the track several times and I cut things up. I don't know Ka personally. I had never met them, but I'm a big admirer of their work. I had put some MIDI flutes on the beginning of “Car Alarm, Turn Signal” and thought a real flute would be cool. I don't want it to sound flutey, you know? All due respect to flutey-ness. I knew that Ka would do something really cool. They were very generous, down to collaborate with a total stranger.
AE: How has your relationship with the cello grown and changed, going from the world of classical to an improvisational space, and how has it impacted the music you make?
LK: I know that my relationship to the cello has changed, but I think that came more with starting to improvise on it than adding other instruments. I love the balance between virtuosity, for lack of a better word, and the exploratory quality that I can have with instruments that I don't play very well. I'm not a synth player and it's really fun for me to have a playful balance between the two. Cello is obviously very comfortable. It's often the last thing that I add. If I'm making layers of things, I’ll start with exploratory synth playing, seeing what happens, and then adding cello in a way that can ground it in a more comfortable practice.
AE: You've been very prolific, releasing at least one collaboration or a record every year for the past 4 or 5 years, if not several.
LK: I feel like I'm fairly hyperactive.
AE: What are some of the joys of ceaselessly making new music, especially with so many different people, and what are some of the challenges in always creating and being so pursuant of different sounds?
LK: A lot of the joy comes from what I mentioned earlier about saying different things to different people, especially in collaboration, but also in collaboration with the audience. If I'm playing solo in a new city for new people, there's a feeling that my life is full of possibilities, and that feels wonderful. For conversations, musical and otherwise. It's also a lot of work. In being prolific, I feel like that's partly just how I am, but also there's a pressure where if I'm not making something, I don't know who I am. I sometimes have trouble relaxing. I get better at it in the summer, I spend a lot of time at the lake. I'm not a very chill person, so that's a roadblock.
AE: When you're not making music, but still feeling a restless urge to create, are there other avenues that you've been able to spend time exploring? I know you’ve done the cover art for at least a few records.
LK: It's interesting that you're asking that question because I just re-signed up to be part of a ceramics studio. That's not part of my artistic practice, it's just a thing that I do for creative joy. It might become part of my practice, but for now, it's just something that I like. I do make a lot of visual art, sort of functionally, cover art and posters and things, which I really enjoy. I made a video for the first single on the album, which was really fun. It's fun to bring that side of my brain into it. When I do relax, I try to find other creative things to do. Gardening is creative. I cook with my partner a lot. Friendship is creative. I try to sort of lean into those parts of things instead of other “officially” creative practices that I have.
AE: It’s funny that there are certain things that are “officially creative.” You're putting out a record, you're being creative versus spending time with someone or even gardening. It's good to have joys that aren't productive but are still satisfying.
LK: The productiveness is the operative word there. It's good to be not productive.
AE: What's something that you love about your own approach to creativity and making art, whether in your own work or even just in the movement of life?
LK: There's a sort of intuitive playfulness that I can bring to both collaboration and to my solo work that I think is really special and unique to me. Playfulness can also be a deep thing. I like to think that God is playful, you know?
AE: Whatever God may be out there, I think they definitely have a sense of humor. You're missing the point if you try to push against that.
Normal Sounds is out August 30th via Moon Glyph.