For Lia Kohl, everyday sounds are her bread and butter. A fan of field recordings and recontextualising the sounds of the world around us, the Chicago-based composer and sound artist finds ways to show noises of the world in a different light. Her previous album, Normal Sounds, was arguably a perfect encapsulation of this as she weaved music around and between noises from fridges, car alarms, and self-checkouts. Her new record, Various Small Whistles and a Song, condenses this idea even further, offering up 16 one-minute-long morsels of every life from various locations, from her hometown of Chicago to places like Antwerp, Guangzhou, and Barcelona. They are like miniature vignettes of ordinary life.
Inspired by American artist Ed Ruscha’s 1964 book Various Small Fires and Milk, Kohl comes at her subject matter with her tongue in cheek as she offers up an ode to conceptual art from almost 60 years ago. Various Small Whistles is conceptual through and through, and brief as albums come. It’s also listening best done inside and with headphones on so as to appreciate the minute detail and to stop everyday noises around you polluting it. You’ll hear scattershot conversations, fierce wind blowing up against the microphone, the thrum of traffic, the din of train stations, birdsong; they are like postcards from around the world, capturing everyday life in various guises, be it walking home in Chicago, wandering street markets in Guangzhou, hustling through crowds at a station, or enjoying the natural sounds of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Illinois.
It’s easy to get caught up in all the sounds of the world (and the whistles) that the music happening underneath and between them all can easily slip you by on a passing listen. Alongside Kohl creating tiny tapestries of cello and peaceful synth tones, she invites an assortment of guests to add textures here too, including claire rousay, Macie Stewart, Patrick Shiroishi, Jesse Perlstein, and Colin Held. Where their contributions begin and Kohl’s ends is near impossible to discern at times, but the variety is apparent: Macie Stewart brings a glistening, cocoon-like warmth to “Basketball Court”; Jesse Perlstein adds soap-opera-like bursts of strings to contrast against solemn silence on “Belzec Extermination Camp”; and claire rousay’s synths bring a soothing quality to “Home, Los Angeles.”
Various Small Whistles’ brevity certainly helps it go down easy, but how much replay value it has will vary person to person; by and large it does lose its intrigue quicker than other records from Kohl. There’s plenty of curious detail to pick up on: the familiar whistled tune on “Home, Portland”, what sounds like Kohl whistling through various bottles and utensils on “My Kitchen, Chicago”, the humorous noise of the loud neighbours singing Queen’s “I Want To Break Free” through the walls on final track “Barcelona (6:13 am, January 1st)” (the “milk” in regards to Ruscha’s book here). But for what has been a busy year for Kohl (she has released separate records with Whitney Johnson and zander raymond in the past 12 months), it’s a curious little project to dip into. Like the book it’s named after, it’s fun to open up every so often and take in a little bit of the unexpected everyday musicality of the surrounding world.
