Normal Sounds

Lia Kohl's September Newsletter

Hi buddies,

I’m writing from Antwerp, right in the middle of a three week tour. Touring alone is wonderful, interesting, occasionally lonely, sometimes boring or stressful. Often some complex combination, as in the chocolate croissant I almost missed my train for (wonderful + stressful). As in the sunset hike I took on my first night in Ambialet (interesting + lonely). As in the six hours I spent on a stopped train south of Bordeaux (boring + stressful).

I find that it requires more bravery than my daily life at home, and more ability to know and enact what I need. It’s satisfying to feel so actively alive and actively learning.

Two self portraits, from a bridge in Ambialet, France

Normal Sounds comes out today! I accidentally started this album in an airport in Boston, captivated by the complex frequencies coming from the fridge in the Hudson News. The next week I took a recording of the light above the tennis court near our house and I thought, that kind of sounds like cello harmonics. Collaboration is usually what happens in the space between people, but this album is a collaboration between my ears and my world’s mundane sounds. I hope you hear its playfulness. I hope you hear that sometimes the world offers us music in beautiful coincidences, waiting for you to hear them.

One of my favorite moments on the album is a recording I took last summer, walking from a show in Kilbourn Park. The ice cream truck was playing a song I’d never heard before* over its pleasantly droning freezer, and as I stopped to take a recording, a car horn on the next street started going off in the same key. Maybe that’s nothing. I decided it’s something and then made an album.

Thank you to everyone who helped make it happen, in all the ways you did. You know who you are.

A few shows:

9.3 674FM: Cologne, Germany

9.4 Chair de Poule: Paris, France

9.5 Outrage: Bordeaux, France

9.6 André: Düsseldorf, Germany

9.7 Cinetol: Amsterdam, Netherlands

9.8 Gute Stube: Darmstadt, Germany

9.14 Album release show: Constellation Chicago - this will be a very special show, and the only solo I’m doing in Chicago for a while!

9.15 Honestly Some (that’s Honestly Same minus Mabel) help celebrate Paradise Complete’s album release: International Museum of Surgical Science

9.27 Deidre Huckabay’s Space Songs: Elastic Arts, Chicago

tiny recommendations

1. Often the first thing people ask me about the album is who made that wonderful image on the front? Tine Bek! A wonderful Danish photographer and sculptor. She and I chatted on Facetime yesterday for the first time (we’ll publish the interview via Talkhouse in the next few weeks).

2. Our tomatoes did really well this year, and among the many wonderful things to do with tomatoes, I have been eating a lot of tomato toast: toast, butter (or mayo, if you like that), seasoning (chili oil, furikake, chili flakes flaky salt).

3. Ann Carson, on Parkinson’s, boxing, and paying attention. She never fails to amaze me.

4. Bryn and Nick are releasing another album (as Paradise Complete) in September. Their shared practice of asynchronous improvisation is fascinating to me — it’s been a joy to see how it develops and changes.

5. As a kid I hated oil cured olives, but one of the joys of growing up is that you start to love bitter, salty, strangely textured food (yes, that’s a generalization I stand by). So, another tomato-adjacent recommendation: pasta with caramelized onions, cherry tomatoes, a lot of basil, oil cured olives. Feta, if you want. If your cherry tomatoes are sweet, be sure to leave some of them raw.

6. I finished Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin, which hit me a bit like All Fours did — there’s unique enjoyment in reading about a singular, strange, and often unlikeable woman.

7. The internet has been telling me about packing cubes for a long time and I finally got some.

8. If you are a musician in Chicago, Golden Egg is about to open a grant that will help you start preparing for the retirement/old age filled with music of your dreams. More info at their website here.

9. I deeply enjoyed Jesse Ball’s novella The Lesson, and I’m halfway through Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which I found to be formally baffling at first, but now I’m loving it.

That’s all, for now,

Lia

*Thanks to some research from my dear Mama - the song is The Happy Wanderer.