“Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello […] to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light.” So we wrote of Lia Kohl‘s album Normal Sounds back in 2024, the Chicago-based composer looking to find beauty in her surroundings like many a field recorder before her, though eschewing the typical path towards nature in favour of the anthropogenic and ostensibly mundane. “Here the incidental is elevated,” as we continued in our piece:
each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.
After a collaboration with Whitney Johnson earlier this year, Lia Kohl is now returning with Various Small Whistles and a Song, a new record released via the Belgian label Dauw. As the artistically-inclined might deduce from the title, the album takes inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, a book released in 1964 which featured fifteen photographs of fires and one of a glass of milk, Kohl matching not only the structure of Ruscha’s work (the album offers fifteen whistles and one song) but also its playfulness and deceptive depth.
The result is an attempt to convey the subtle textures of life in a way that feels at once incidental and carefully curated, and one that ultimately adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. The humble whistle, it turns out, is the ideal medium around which to build such a mission. “I’ve always been captivated by whistling,” as Kohl explains. “It’s musical but often a bit unconscious; usually solo but often done in public places. There’s something tender and human about hearing someone whistle, a socially acceptable version of hearing their mind wander.”
With the release set for next month, Lia Kohl has shared three tracks to introduce the style, each clocking in at exactly a humble minute yet able to transport listeners across the world. Recorded in 2017 while Kohl was touring with a theatre company, ‘Penny Whistle Seller, Guangzhou’ takes places within the bustling streets of China, while ‘My Kitchen, Chicago’ is located, you guessed it, within Kohl’s own home. The ever-excellent claire rousay recorded the whistles for ‘Home, Los Angeles’, an example of the thread of collaboration which runs through the record too (artists like Macie Stewart and Patrick Shiroishi also took field recordings for different songs). Each track serves as its own slice of life, a singular moment captured on tape, then accentuated in a way unique to Lia Kohl, but the result is strangely familiar. As though within the impossible diversity of experience present across the world, some common force remains. Something as mundane as it is magic, human and universal.
Various Small Whistles and a Song will be released on the 14th November via Dauw and you can pre-order it now.
Photo by Leah Wendzinski, album design by Jelle Martens