Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, & Macie Stewart’s Body Sound
PRAISE FOR International Anthem
“The Chicago trio reaffirms the pleasure of collective music-making in contemplative improvisations that are both patient and restorative.”
“Rewarding mysteries with an electrifying emotional directness.”
“BODY SOUND is an immersive effort that finds magic and wonder in common objects and situations.”
“There’s a closeness to Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart’s playing that makes it difficult to tease out their viol, cello, and violin; their voices occasionally trail their instruments like shadows.”
“A heady synthesis of spontaneity, experimentation and compositional mettle, BODY SOUND has such emotional resonance that it shakes the foundation of soul and body.”
“A powerful debut full of depth, melancholy, and triumph from three of Chicago’s most interesting experimental artists.”
“A slow unraveling of sonic threads, and as it moves, each string finds purchase across our skin.”
“At once engagingly familiar and aesthetically invigorating.”
dawn | pulse
laundry | blood
chewing gum
door | watch
stone | piece
burning | counting (sleeping)
shadow | mess
paper folding | disappearing
cough | laugh
snow | touch
fog | mirror
Today, Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart release their debut album as a trio, BODY SOUND, on all streaming platforms (following its March 20 release on LP, CD, and digital download) via International Anthem.
Listen to and purchase BODY SOUND here.
This 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.
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.
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
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