Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart’s BODY SOUND
TRACKLIST
dawn | pulse
laundry | blood
chewing gum
door | watch
stone | piece
burning | counting (sleeping)
shadow | mess
paper folding | disappearing
cough | laugh
snow | touch
fog | mirror
CREDITS
Whitney Johnson viola, voice
Lia Kohl cello, voice
Macie Stewart violin, voice
Tascam 58, Revox A77, Sony TC 580, TEAC 6600, Portastudio 414mkII
All music by Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart
Produced by Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart, and Dave Vettraino
Engineered by Dave Vettraino at IARC studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Big Ears Festival 2025 (Knoxville), and Shirk Studios (Chicago)
Mastered by David Allen
Artwork courtesy of Jovencio de la Paz and Chris Sharp Gallery
Design & layout by Matilde Santiago
BODY SOUND is out now, purchase it here.
Today, Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart release their debut album as a trio, BODY SOUND, on LP, CD, and digital download via International Anthem (available on all streaming platforms April 8). They also share today a new streaming single, “burning | counting (sleeping).” At 12pm CST today, Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart will be hosting a virtual Bandcamp listening party, RSVP here.
Listen to “burning | counting (sleeping)” and purchase BODY SOUND here.
Next month the trio will be on tour across the East Coast, alongside a hometown performance in Chicago before a string of dates in Europe / the UK; tickets and more info below. Watch a live performance of “stone | piece” here and “laundry | blood” here, both filmed and recorded at International Anthem’s Chicago HQ, The Land School.
Within “burning | counting (sleeping),” deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia, gives way to an oncoming long-note tranquility. As Whitney Johnson explains: “We all like to push the limits of our instruments, and this piece walks the razor edge at times, maintaining tonality while blowing out the timbre and hitting the rhythm on the front edge of the beat until it almost wants to fragment, disintegrate.”
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.
Their influences are vast — dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a Midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is: listening and reacting.
BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s also part of an ongoing creative continuum, informed by the improvised music idioms of the trio’s hometown, Chicago, and boasts track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino worked alongside the trio to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of the 2025 Big Ears Festival). Then Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart edited and reshaped the recordings by hand, employing multiple analog tape machines to create loops that open up new pathways of improvisation, allowing them to reimagine and layer their intuitive material into meticulously crafted compositions.
It was all done in response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect. The resultant music has inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality, with a sense of place that is both magical and realistic. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album — an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection — that manages to decode high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.
LIVE DATES
April 22 – Pittsburgh PA – Mattress Factory
April 23 – East Meredith NY – West Kortright Center
April 26 – Philadelphia PA – First Unitarian Church, Side Chapel
April 27 – Baltimore MD – 2640 Space
April 28 – Kingston, NY – Tubby’s
April 29 – Portland ME – Washington Baths
April 30 – Brattleboro VT – Epsilon Spires
May 1 – North Adams MA – Tourists Welcome
May 2 – Brooklyn NY – Long Play Festival
May 7 – Chicago IL – Constellation
June 3 – Stockholm SE – Fasching
June 4 – Berlin, DE – Kieszalon @ Das Minsk
June 6 – London UK – Cafe Oto
June 9 – Poitiers FR – Conforte Moderne
ABOUT WHITNEY JOHNSON
Based in Chicago, Whitney Johnson composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. As artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden, she composed sine waves, marimba, viola, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and Halldorophone into a multi-channel performance-installation and her latest LP, Hav (2024, Drag City). As Matchess, the Stena cassette (2024, Drag City) embodies an alter ego to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity.
Recent performance-installations FIAT (2025, Indexical, Roulette Intermedium and 2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Death in Trafo (or, The Crater) (2023, Logan Center for the Arts), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019–2022, worldwide) consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states.
In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018. In 2022, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, and she is an artist-in-residence at Q-O2 Brussels in 2025. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
ABOUT LIA KOHL
Lia Kohl is a composer and sound artist based in Chicago. Trained as a cellist, she also incorporates synthesizers, field recordings, toy instruments, and radios into her work, searching for a balance between virtuosity and curiosity. She gravitates towards sound practices which reveal and speak to their time and place: field recording, improvisation, radio broadcast, and transmission. She often focuses on mundane or pedestrian sounds – sounds which often go unnoticed or under-documented, searching for the profound, unknown, and beautiful in everyday life.
She performs as a soloist, a collaborator, and composes works for ensembles. She has presented work and performed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Union Station Chicago, Eckhart Park Pool, and Big Ears Festival. She has created sound installations for Experimental Sound Studios’ Audible Gallery and Roman Susan Art Foundation. She has been a resident artist at ACRE, Vashon Artist Residency, High Concept Labs, dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Stanford University, and Mills College and a Transmission Art Fellow at Wave Farm.
NPR Music describes her music as “true poetry” and the Chicago Tribune calls her “a master of the form.” She has releases on Drag City, International Anthem, Moon Glyph, Longform Editions, and American Dreams Records. She tours nationally and internationally.
ABOUT MACIE STEWART
Macie Stewart is a musician and multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Heralded for their versatility, Stewart works with piano, violin, guitar, voice, and synthesizers, effortlessly traversing styles and scenes. Stewart is a distinguished, go-to collaborator who Pitchfork credits with “making some of the best tracks of the past five years transcendent.”
As a composer, Stewart’s work continues to dissolve the boundaries between disciplines. Aside from her debut record, Mouth Full of Glass released in 2021 on Orindal Records and re-released in 2022 on Full Time Hobby Records—Macie also composed a piece for Hubbard Street Dance’s film, Half of Us, alongside Sima Cunningham in 2021. That same year, they worked with Cunningham and Alex Grelle to produce a performance piece paying homage to Kate Bush.
In 2022, Stewart/Cunningham composed the score for a 50-piece orchestra premiering the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Before I Was. And in 2023, choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams enlisted Stewart to create a sound installation for her dreamlike performance piece, Hisako House. Most recently, Stewart was invited to compose a site-specific piece for the ESS Florasonic Installation at Lincoln Park Conservatory. As part of the longest-running sound installation in North America, their twenty-minute composition titled The World Doubles in Size played in the conservatory’s fern room from September through November of 2024.
In March of 2025, Stewart released When the Distance is Blue via International Anthem, an album that “folds prepared piano, string quartet, and field recordings into elegant expressions of nameless longing” (Pitchfork), and is “at once lulling and eerie” (New York Times).