Machines make for a messy and muddy kind of silence. In the city, even if you think there’s a moment of calm and quiet, you aren’t far off from hearing the hum of traffic somewhere in the distance, the chatter of passersby on the street, or the whir of a computer fan. One thinks of this year’s A Quiet Place: Day One, which opens with the information, “New York City gives off an average of 90 decibels. That is the volume of a constant scream.” Like birds adjusting to city lights preventing complete darkness from emerging, we learn to adapt to the din.
These are the noises we learn to tune out, to live with everyday. But while we’re ignoring this everyday dissonance as we go about our daily lives, Lia Kohl is listening. The Chicago cellist, composer, and sound artist soaks up the thrum of assorted noises around her, and on her new album – aptly titled Normal Sounds – she weaves music in and around them. “It’s a love letter to the mundane sonic world, to the part of my brain that just can’t stop listening to everything, all the time,” she explains.
Like her previous album (last year’s The Ceiling Reposes), Normal Sounds offers up a platter of wonderful details to find and examine throughout its runtime. Each track is titled after its sound source (or sources), and it’s impossible not to keep your ear tuned to when these inspirational noises make their appearance. Car alarms, fridges, fluorescent lights, the various mechanical whirs of an airplane; everyday unremarkable sounds suddenly become fascinating curiosities.
This is down to how Kohl plays with them. On “Tennis Court Light, Snow” she uses the artificial buzz of the titular illumination device as an anchoring drone that she harmonises woozy cello figures over, creating a watery warble that sounds strangely otherworldly. Similarly on the following track “Car Alarm, Turn Signal” the flutter of Ka Baird’s flutes make for an embryonic alien sound world before the hypnotizing, repetitive, almost jazzy drones of the turn signal’s back and forth rhythm lull you into a peaceful state. Noises that would be notoriously irritating or bothersome out of this context take on an unexpectedly relaxing quality with the fluid compositions Kohl creates from them.
When she’s not playing around the noise and eking out its natural musical quality, she’s akin to a lyre bird, mimicking the found sounds and making her own versions of them. On “Car Horns” she and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi play various staccato notes and tones over the blare of traffic noises. The end result is like a car park coming to life as more and more alarms are activated into a surprisingly musical cacophony. “Ice Cream Truck, Tornado Siren” couples and juxtaposes joy against danger, Kohl’s synths and cello sounding like deconstructed careful guitar chords of the jaunty ice cream truck melody. Over five minutes the childish múm-like melody comes into focus, creating a delightful moment underpinned by the dreaded warning of the siren.
At its best Normal Sounds offers an entry into its compositions with one of its source noises and drops you out the other end somewhere new and unexpected, often going from one sound source to another in the process. Sporadic percussive knocking and synth arpeggios form into a fuzzy drone on “Airport Fridge, Self Checkout” before the voice of a self checkout chimes “remember to grab your receipt”. “Plane” takes you on what feels like a whole aerial journey through the skies: passenger chatter and the rubbery squeaking of airplane machinery blossom into Peter Gregson-like cloudy bliss, where everything sounds strangely peaceful and still; a human voice emerges at the other end as a flight attendant gives us the instructions for exiting the plane. Like other tracks here, it all morphs rather seamlessly. Kohl makes the mechanical sounds human. Like with The Ceiling Reposes, she recontextualizes the world around us, finding new inspiration, new beauty, and even new tiny strands of humour in the everyday commotion of noises. Machines make our sound world messy, but Lia Kohl tidies it up for that brief moment.
