Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart Go Beyond the Chamber
Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl, and Whitney Johnson. (Credit: Leah Wendzinski)
All but one of the song titles on Body Sound, the debut album from experimental string trio Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart, line up nicely—a few words, usually two, usually nouns, separated by a vertical bar: “dawn | pulse,” “shadow | mess,” “fog | mirror.” The straight line in the middle means different things in different disciplines. In computing, it’s called a “pipe” and serves as a conduit. In poetry, it denotes a pause or break. In music, it marks the beginning and end of measures. The classical textures, ambient forms, and conceptual investigations of Body Sound cover a similar semiotic range, separating, connecting, and shaping disparate sonic ideas.
Johnson (viola), Kohl (cello), and Stewart (violin) begin with free-form improvisations, blending and contrasting the rich tones and grainy timbres of their instruments. Tracks like “stone | piece” and “cough | laugh” benefit immensely from the longing orchestral sonorities and lapping tidal rhythms that abound in chamber and symphonic music. Though Body Sound marks the trio’s debut, the members have previously worked together—Johnson and Kohl on last year’s For Translucence (Drag City) and Kohl and Stewart on 2020’s Recipe for a Boiled Egg (Astral Spirits), and all three on Stewart’s When the Distance Is Blue (International Anthem), from last year—and you can hear that experience in the intuition and attention that suffuses these songs. But improvisation is only the starting point. Like their Chicago peers SML, Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart then shape the spontaneous material in post-production, adding loops, effects, and layers.
It can be fun trying to figure out where the line between in-the-moment inspiration and later tape manipulation lies. Did the somber surge of “burning | counting (sleeping)” evolve organically, or was it sculpted? Did Kohl really manage to get the looped oil-drum thump that drives the eerie “laundry | blood” out of her cello using just a judiciously placed barrette, as the liner notes attest? What could possibly be producing the unstable tone that ripples gloriously through the middle of “stone | piece”?
Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart counterbalance Body Sound‘s rewarding mysteries with an electrifying emotional directness. All three contribute airy, wordless vocals, often just overlapping coos or melodic murmurs, that give the atmospheric strings real contours and depths. Like the work of Meredith Monk, these tracks make the avant-garde approachable, almost homey. Even tracks that don’t feature vocals, such as the monolithic, drone-centered “snow | touch” and the flowing yet fragmentary “door | watch” have a slightly numinous, breathing quality, as if waiting for a signal to break into song. The vocals sometimes evoke the inhuman, as well: The pizzicato syncopation of “paper folding | disappearing,” in which Kohl plays her cello like a bass, is offset by intermittent, smeared vocal lines that have the forlorn warmth of passing trains. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have immersed themselves in fruitful contradictions, exploring the contrasts of spontaneous creation and considered collage, organic realism and studio wizardry, experimental daring and familiar intimacy. An album with no words, Body Sound is intensely lyrical; composed of intricate, ambiguous pieces, it sounds remarkably whole.
