Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart

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. 

The album’s lead single “dawn | pulse” is an undulating slow roller, a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND. 

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.