Landing on Coruscant never fails to impress
Inbound
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Street Music
Wandered onto the scene of a crime
Lia Kohl, Site Specific
Live at (and for) Chicago's Union Station
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The Union Station on Lia Kohl’s album Music for Union Station, released earlier this month, is the one in Chicago, Illinois. The “for” in its title means that the music was designed to make use of the place’s richly reverberant qualities, as well as to enter into a conversation with the sounds inherent in that space. The single piece, three quarters of an hour in length, features 10 acoustic instruments, among them Kohl’s cello. Also in the mix: Dorothy Carlos, a second cello; Zachary Good and Jason Stein, bass clarinets; Gerrit Hatcher, tenor saxophone; Riley Leitch and Nick Meryhew, trombones; Beth McDonald, tuba; Zach Moore, bass; and Macie Stewart, violin. Also also in the mix: those site-specific noises, notably the voices of passing travelers (and at least once persistent cough). There is an oceanic drone to Music for Union Station that, along with a nostalgic tinge to the strings, brings to mind the music of Gavin Bryars, and occasionally there’s a quiet pulse that suggesting the minimalism of Philip Glass and Terry Riley. In combination, it’s all pure Kohl: considered, reflective, and deeply resonant.
On Repeat: Earth, Samplr, Duet
Home/office playlist
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ The EP Extra Capsular Extraction was the first recorded music from Earth, the trenchant doom/drone/sludge metal band led by Dylan Carlson. It dates back to 1991. Geometry of Murder: Extra Capsular Extraction Inversions is a reworking of that source material by Black Noi$e (aka Robert Mansel), who’s worked largely in hip-hop with the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Armand Hammer, among others. If you’re looking for an artistic green shoot at the start of 2026, a hint of the universe bending toward fruitful cross-cultural collaborations, this is such a thing. Just one track, “Divine and Bright (Black Noi$e Inversion),” is on Bandcamp, but the whole thing’s on streaming services. It has a heavy Bill Laswell vibe, which I mean as a high compliment.
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▰ One of Andrew Tasselmyer’s late-Jamuary tracks was a video of him performing just with a single app, the iPad classic called Samplr. Fantastic exploration of sonic stasis, the source samples being piano and strings.
▰ This video apparently goes back four years, but it’s new to me: a fine duet between great Norwegian musicians John Derek Bishop (synthesizer) and Eivind Aarset (guitar, heavy on the eBow).
#Jamuary 2025 19–22
Four more
After a break, as the work year kicked in, I did another five days of #Jamuary in a row. Again, the mode I’ve adopted is starting a patch in VCV Rack, and then tweaking the patch each day as I learn more about the given modules. If I this past week yielded one takeaway, it’s that I need to stop only thinking of patches as performances or compositions, and to also use them as source material within a DAW, such as Ableton, or even within Audacity, a multitrack editor. I do this on occasion, but I don’t focus on the approach enough. I’ll either push this patch a bit further, or move on to a new patch for the coming week.
▰ 19\31 — “Done Broke”: Breaking up the same sample actively into cues, having it play those cues random, and when it gets to a specific cue it repeats, a momentary centering, and then sets off in random mode again. Round and round.
▰ 20\31 — “Step Wide”: Another day with the same sample, building on the same patch, this time using one snippet on the 1, 2, and 4, and filling the 3 with a random bit from elsewhere in the source audio, always shorter than the main sample, so it repeats a bit and gets cut off sometimes. And on the 2, the main sample goes through a bit of distortion that’s always a little different from the previous time.
▰ 21\31 — “16 Stuff”: Same basic patch, pushed a little further, this time the sampling module replaced with a 16-step sequencer in which each step the sample is tweaked one way or another: pitch, volume, effect, etc.
▰ 22\31 — “Stride Gate”: Took a different approach this time, though still with the same sample and a sample player, but what happens is a square wave turns on and off the freeze effect, with the original audio passed through, and the mix set so if there’s freeze, that’s all you hear, and if there’s no freeze, you just hear the original. The alternation sets the pace, such as it is. This is all in VCV Rack.