Whitney Johnson, viola; Lia Kohl, cello; and Macie Stewart, violin, with all three of them intoning vocally, collaborated on this live set, in which their playing merges with lengthy tape loops. The ear is encouraged to make sense of the seeming disparity, between the focused performance and the disembodied tapes, between the motifs and the loops, between the capacious in situ acoustics and the medium’s fragile textures — it’s a difference nudged further still when Kohl takes a seat besides one of the tape machines and engages with it, making the tool as much a performed instrument as the more traditional stringed ones.
This video is the start of something. The track is one of two on a new release, Bound Sound [Stone Piece], which is itself a preview of an album due in 2025.
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The performance took place at the Land School in Chicago. The film was directed by Derrick Alexander.
So nice. I’ve only really got into Lia Kohl in the last month and I’m happy to hear more from her!