Lia Kohl: Attuned to Sound

The Chicago-based cellist and composer on the importance of collaboration, community, and paying attention

Lia Kohl might be experimental music’s hardest-working cellist.

Since moving to Chicago in 2013, she has become a prolific collaborator in the local improv scene, while working extensively in composition, performance and installation, and touring the US as well as internationally.

Much of Kohl’s work is based on collaboration: She’s part of electroacoustic quintet Honestly Same, has recorded albums with Macie Stewart, Zachary Good, Whitney Johnson and Daniel Wyche, and appeared on records by Steve Gunn, Steve Hauschildt, Claire Rousay, and Makaya McCraven.

As a solo artist and composer, she released two albums, Too Small to Be a Plain (2022) and The Ceiling Reposes (2023), which found her weaving together samples of radio static, nature sounds, plucked and bowed cello, bells, kazoo and synthesizers.

On her conceptual third solo album, Normal Sounds, Kohl repurposes the noises of everyday life. By paying attention to their details, she turns them into something remarkable, even gorgeous at times, creating a magical, dream-like sound world out of the extremely mundane.

Lia Kohl, photo: Leah Wendzinski

What are some of your earliest memories of music?

Probably singing and playing the piano with my mom. She had a book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that paired classic folk songs with paintings from their collection, and we would sing and play from it most evenings. I have strong associations between visual art and music, partly because of that book.

Can you lead us through your musical training?

My mom is a musician and had the biggest impact on my musical education. She helped me develop my ear and my creativity from a young age. I started playing cello when I was eight, and went through rigorous classical training through conservatory. I’ve also sung in church my whole life, a mostly aural musical tradition which has deeply impacted my compositional and formal understanding of music.

I’ve heard people compare the character of the cello to the human voice. 

I know what people mean when they say that, but I think the saxophone sounds more like a voice! Someday I’d like to learn to play the saxophone. That being said, I have been playing the cello for so long that it does feel like a kind of voice – more so than my synthesizers. 

When did you decide that a career as a classical musician isn’t for you and that you want to become an artist/composer instead?

It wasn’t a sudden change for me. When I first moved to Chicago, I began improvising and playing more contemporary classical and New Music. I was also playing a lot with a conductorless classical orchestra that I helped to start. I was interested in all kinds of things and doing a lot of exploring. I think sometimes the best and most momentous life choices are actually a series of small choices, and this one is no exception. I just kept doing things that were interesting and challenging to me, and that led me to what I’m doing now.

If someone offered me an interesting classical music project now, I might take it. I’m also doing more composing this coming year, which still includes a lot of collaboration and improvisation, but certainly interacts with my classical training.

Though you have played on many recordings, you seem to focus on performing live and more specifically, the practice of improvisation. What is so fascinating about it to you?

Collaboration is always the first and best part of making music, for me. Playing live is a collaboration with the audience and the room, improvisation is a conversation between musicians. In conversation, I think we say different things to different people, and the same is true of music. So I’m always interested in what new things will emerge from new musical conversations. People are so interesting and endless.

What’s your relation to the rich experimental music history of Chicago? 

I grew up in New York City and San Francisco, and came here as an adult. But I feel very welcomed by the scene here, and definitely affected by its artistic and musical history. I began improvising when I moved here, and I know that some of the freedom I feel in that comes from the deep tradition of improvised and creative music that flourish here in Chicago. I’ve found people here are very open, very willing to experiment, very inclined to support each other. That’s a good environment for making art.

Do you feel like you’re part of a community of experimental musicians, locally or even globally at this point?

I do feel that way. This summer I started collaborations with a handful of new musician friends who I met via the experimental music community online and through other collaborations. It’s really fun to begin a friendship and working relationship just by knowing that you have similar musical and artistic interests. Mari Maurice, who performs as more eaze, Lynn Avery and I started a trio. Cole Pulice – my labelmate at Moon Glyph –, producer extraordinaire Andrew Broder and I also did some recording and performing.  

I’m also endlessly inspired by my colleagues in Chicago! I have a nice balance here of longtime collaborators, like the musicians in Honestly Same, and newer musical friends, like fellow radio nerd Jeff Kolar. 

Lia Kohl, photo: Leah Wendzinski

I first discovered your music through your work with analog radio in your longform composition Untitled Radio (futile, fertile). Where does your relationship with the medium come from? 

I loved tuning through the radio as a kid, trying to find songs I liked. Six or seven years ago I found an old, slightly broken radio in my landlady’s basement and started making little pieces with it. I like the physicality of it – both the radio as an object and the radio waves. 

Last year I had a fellowship at Wave Farm, a center for radio and transmission art in upstate New York. They have a pretty extensive archive, and I learned a lot about the tradition of radio art through that experience. It's wonderful to follow an interest that feels intuitive and find that it just keeps growing. There’s so much to learn about radios, I’m just getting started. 

After years of collaborative work, you’ve released two solo albums in 2022 and 2023, and especially the second one, The Ceiling Reposes, received very positive feedback and reviews. I loved that one as well.

Thank you! It’s wonderful to have people from all over the world listen to my music and appreciate it. I thought the second record, especially, was pretty strange, so the positive feedback really took me by surprise.

How do you divide your time between all your different projects – touring, recording, improv, residencies, installations… is it a spontaneous, continuous flow where one thing naturally leads to the next?

Sometimes it feels like a flow and sometimes it feels like a flood and sometimes it feels like I don’t do anything. I try to put a lot out into the world and see what resonates – I don’t want to force things to happen. So when I get an idea, I try it out and see if it sticks. And I try to say ‘yes’ to things that are interesting or challenging, and ‘no’ to things that make me tired or bored. Sometimes I do things because I need to pay rent. It’s a big and constant balance.

The concept of your new album Normal Sounds revolves around sounds of everyday life. What drew your attention to these sounds?

I often refer to this really fun conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman. In it, Cage talks about making music with the radio partly because he finds it to be incredibly annoying. So he reorients his relationship to the radio by making music with it. A lot of the sounds that I’m working with on the record are kind of annoying – as a person who’s very attuned to sound, I feel the constant barrage of sounds in 2024 to be pretty overwhelming. And it’s even more overwhelming to try to ignore them. So, like Cage, I’m reorienting myself, doing the opposite of ignoring them. 

There are also sounds that I find to be genuinely beautiful, the closer you listen to them. The drones of fridges and electric lighting, for example, are full of rich frequencies. Some things just need a little more attention. For example, I do love the sound of the tornado siren – it’s so haunting and lovely. They test them every first Tuesday of the month here in Chicago, and someday I’d like to make more work with that sound.

You’ve said that directing your attention to these sounds is part of “a practice of trying to be more alive”. 

I definitely resonate with practices that focus on attention. I think trying to pay attention is the hardest and best work we can do while we’re here.

Lastly, I enjoy your Substack newsletter – you have an impeccable taste in music, films and books. It reads as if you were talking to a small group of friends.

I’m so glad to hear that! I like writing that newsletter a lot – for me it’s a nice way of collecting and sharing the interesting things I’ve read, watched and cooked each month. And of course sharing shows and other professional news. It feels a lot more human than, say, Instagram. Honestly I do sometimes forget that it’s gone far beyond being a small group of friends!

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Media Diet

Listening: Evelyn Glennie, Owen Gardner, John Edwards, Bex Burch – Tangled Goodbye (2024)

In September 2022, xylophonist Bex Burch invited lauded percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, virtuoso bassist John Edwards, and experimental guitarist Owen Gardner (Horse Lords) to perform an improvised live set with her at East London’s Café Oto.

Tangled Goodbye coheres elements of free jazz, noise, industrial, minimal music and musique concrète. It sounds wild and free at times, then again quiet and restrained, thriving off dynamics and contrast. Quietness and space gives way to loudness and frenzy, gentle slowness leads into frenetic busyness. What doesn’t change is that it feels vital and alive in every moment.

Read my interview with Bex Burch

Reading #1: George Saunders – Exhortation (2000)

George Saunders is a brilliant writer who finds surprising new ways of constructing narratives. In this short story from his lauded collection Tenth of December, he “attempts to mimic of a pretty nice guy who is in the middle of some real filth, urging his colleagues to put their shoulders to the wheel”, which amusingly reminded me of my days as a manager in music tech.

Reading #2: Cory Doctorow – Disenshittify or Die (2024)

Staying on the subject – if you really want to understand what went wrong with big tech, take 33 minutes to read this speech. Doctorow is a writer and activist who coined the term ‘enshittification’ to describe the pattern in which online products and platforms decline in quality. You’ll have to endure a lot of strong and violent language, but the content is truly enlightening.

Watching: Jim Jarmusch – Paterson (2016)

Adam Driver plays Paterson, a busdriver and amateur poet with a stoic mentality, who grew up and still lives in the New Jersey city of the same name. The quiet, restrained film follows Paterson’s calm everyday life, driving his bus, writing poetry and spending his evenings with unrestingly creative wife Laura, grumpy bulldog Marvin and barkeeper Doc.

The movie’s capturing ambient soundtrack was composed by Jarmusch’s own musical project SQÜRL; apparently it was inspired by live-scoring some of Man Ray’s experimental 1920s silent films on analog synthesizers.