Conversations/Interviews
Documented Dialogues with Elizabeth Metzger
Having a Think with Tine Bek (Talkhouse)
Attuned To Sound (Zensounds)
Songs of Our Lives (Podcast)
Praise for Normal Sounds:
“It’s remarkable: She finds meditative grace in the city’s most annoying sounds.”
Phillip Sherburne, Pitchfork
“This is just the best ear candy in the world and what she does with these sounds is just so beautiful”
“This is true poetry”
Robin Hilton, Tom Huizenga, NPR All Songs Considered
“Throughout, the moods are volatile just as our everyday routines are: moments of simple beauty making way for anxious introspection and escapist whimsy.”
Antonio Poscic, The Quietus
“An otherworldly album that’s very much of the physical world”
Miles Bowe, Bandcamp
“Normal Sounds is most magical when slivers from our contemporary cacophony cohabit with Kohl and her collaborators’ playing, when they feel integral rather than incidental...Exploring the boundary between noise and music isn’t unusual. But Kohl finds songs hiding in their whispers, squeaks and hums.”
Daryl Worthington, The Wire
“Even the most dissonant sounds are incorporated beautifully into the whole and made an integral part of each melody. Kohl calls her approach to this album “a practice of trying to be more alive,” and her regard for these sounds—her respect for them, even—suggests the depths of experience that we all miss by tuning them out of our everyday lives.”
Matthew Blackwell, “Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp” August 2024
Praise for The Ceiling Reposes:
"The Chicago cellist duets with scraps of radio and field recordings on her bold and strangely moving second record… It sounds like summer in the city when all the windows are open and all the sounds in the world are playing at once and passing through you—as though you, too, were made of air, just one more vibration in a cosmic web of buzz."
Phillip Sherburne, Pitchfork
“though we may never be able to define the unknown, or to hold it in our hands, Kohl’s music lets us live in it for a little while, transforming the invisible around us into tales to remember.”
Vanessa Ague, The Quietus (album of the week)
“She frames each fragmentary sample so that even the static feels like a living part of the lush, tranquil, gradually evolving music, and the radio recordings mesh with the other material so well that you might wonder if they weren’t also somehow responding to her… as calming as a warm bath.” Leor Galil, Chicago Reader
“Lia Kohl is not afraid to break a few rules… Call it time travel, if you will. And Kohl is a master of the form.”
Britt Julious, Chicago Tribune
“like a transmission sent into space and retrieved after the fall of civilization… When nothing seems to make sense – for example, when the ceiling reposes on bottomless air – the ear seeks an anchor, which for Smith is love and for Kohl is sound itself.”
A Closer Listen
Lia Kohl stitches together sacred and profane, mundane and synthetic, environmental sounds, drones, random noises and organized sounds and manages to connect a soup of experiences in a homogeneous fabric, and thus demonstrates that just as every object can become art, all sounds can become music if kept in harmony with the world that generates them. Masterpiece.
Listening Wind (IT)