Lia Kohl’s new album is part-sound installation, part-deep ambient reflection, part-state of the globe audio survey. She uses field recordings, synthesisers and instrumentation to build a set of tracks, inspired by a set of photographs.
The album title, Various Small Whistles and a Song, references US photographer Ed Ruscha’s 1964 book, Various Small Fires and Milk. It consisted of sixteen black and white photos. Fifteen show everyday objects alight – a matchbook, a stove, a cigarette – and one final image showed a quenching glass of milk. Ruscha’s pop art sensibility, dead-pan humour and focus on the apparently mundane inspired Kohl to record sound vignettes with a parallel brief. The album consists of sixteen tracks, each exactly one minute long, based on field recordings made in specific US and European locations – Chicago, Arrington, Portland, Antwerp, Barcelona – and one in China. Each track contains whistling, mostly from people, but also from trains, sounds that clearly fascinate her.
Kohl, based in Chicago, is a cellist as well as a sound artist. She is also a natural collaborator, crediting nine other artists on the sixteen-minute album, including Claire Rousay, Patrick Shiroishi and Maisie Stewart. The communal nature of her work is evident in the warmth and generosity of the music, which has a sonic depth that rewards repeated listening, and an underlying love of people and places. Kohl’s cello makes appearances, most startlingly on ‘Belzec Extermination Camp’, recorded at the former Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, where the ordinary is anything but. A snatch of bashed piano and a sweeping cello figure are snatched away then return, as someone whistles in what sounds like a corridor and a door slams. It is a brief minute loaded with significance.
‘Belzec Extermination Camp’ comes halfway through an album packed with locations and their implications. The opening track, ‘Voting Line, Downtown Chicago’, has calm piano and the bustling sounds of people in an echoing public space. It has all the ordinariness of the political process, waiting with others for a booth, and all the extraordinariness of voting in a fascist-adjacent USA, today. Tracks are contemplative but also propulsive, channeling the wonder and mystery of the everyday, and the juxtaposition of the commonplace with the exceptional which is the real context for living.
From the loping, off-beats and rhythmic sales patter of ‘Penny Whistle Seller, Guangzhou’ to the tinkling, looped bells and whistling train guard of ‘Amtrak, Hudson Valley’, Kohl’s soundscapes are rich, precise and compelling. Despite political and historical shadows, the underlying mood is one of quiet delight. ‘My Kitchen, Chicago’ is a joyful gallop, while ‘Walking Home, Chicago’ is a charged, beautiful piece undercutting a bubbling melody, which sounds as though it is playing in the walker’s head, beside the ambient traffic.
Various Small Whistles and a Song is a very high quality record. It is conceptually convincing and lovingly crafted, but also a highly enjoyable listen – a rare achievement. When the song comes, in the final track – ‘Barcelona. (6.13am, January St) – it is a drunken new year singalong, the words unintelligible but the mood of togetherness and celebration unmistakable. Like the previous fifteen tracks, it is brief, intriguing and eloquent.
