BODY SOUND – the first album from Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl and Macie Stewart – arrives with a certain inevitability. The three Chicago-based multi-disciplinary musicians share not only a base location but also a passion for morphing music into new forms, working with string instruments but also synthesizers, analogue tape loops, field recordings, and other means of working outside the box. All three have extensive bodies of work behind them: from performance installations to artists in residences; from sound installations to orchestral compositions. They all bring a wealth of experience to the table.
The inevitability of their teaming up comes not just from hometown proximity, but also because they seem to have been ships passing in the night, having worked with each other separately, but rarely as a trio. Kohl seems to be the connecting thread: she paired up with Stewart on 2020’s Recipe for a Boiled Egg and separately with Johnson on last year’s For Translucence. For BODY SOUND they come together with what feels like an incredibly natural ease; they sink into each other with such deftness it can often be impossible to tell where one person’s contribution starts and the other’s end. It all makes for an album that moves with a watery grace, lulling at certain junctures, vigorous at others, and always forming and reforming. As per the Heraclitus adage, the proverbial river Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart make never feels the same river next time round.
Evoking the work of Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, the combination of live strings, field recordings, and tape effects meld seamlessly. The seven-minute centrepiece “stone | piece” showcases the trio’s talent in the way they build new forms before you: the track builds brick by brick, layer by layer, but strands are gradually taken away, loose threads becoming sonic squiggles. “laundry | blood” is anchored by a soft metallic percussive loop, like a washing machine on a gentle cycle. The everyday churn is contrasted with dramatic, pensive strings as wave forms disintegrate, like red stains bleeding out from white sheets and then dissolved in water. When it all coalesces only for it to slowly disperse, it’s as strong an example of the musicians’ work and skills as you could want.
Just hearing the three artists weaving in and out of each other is as much a pleasure. On final track “fog | mirror” they all take turns as the backbone of the song with slow, thoughtful strokes on cello, violin, and viola. The screechy cacophony on “burning | counting (sleeping)” will jolt any listener into sitting upright as Stewart and Johnson’s agitated violin and viola increasingly impose on Kohl’s soft cello interlude until the din comes to a head again. At moments it sounds dissonant, but a moment of elegance and synergy is rarely far off; BODY SOUND is often locked in but still retains an improvisatory feel, like Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart found a glimmer of gold and kept panning until they found a larger nugget.
Those glimmers and nuggets will come in different forms depending on what qualities resonate with the listener most. Graceful moments showcasing the way their music can unfold (the Tibetan bowl music-like “shadow | mess”, the Max Richter-esque opening track “dawn | pulse”);tracks that sound like the trio reacting in real time to the room (the cavernous “door | watch”, which evokes Andrew Bird’s Echolocations as they play with the reverberations ricocheting off the walls); and curious sonic experiments (“cough | laugh”, with its pizzicato plucks over a slowed down swell of strings). Given how a recorded collaboration between Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart was inevitable at some point, it’s great that there’s little disappointment to be found. The inevitable might sound as expected, but that’s no bad thing with artists with such intriguing talents.
