Lia Kohl Announces 'The Ceiling Reposes' out March 10, 2023 via American Dreams – Shares “Sit on the Floor and Wait for Storms” via Foxy Digitalis

Lia Kohl Announces The Ceiling Reposes
out March 10, 2023 via American Dreams

Shares Lead Single "sit on the floor and wait for storms" via Foxy Digitalis

Shares US Tour Dates


Lia Kohl (Ash Dye)

"Kohl’s music exhibits a stoic serenity, finding calm and comfort in the act of searching for something else without concern about where the answers lead. " -Foxy Digitalis

“an expansive, performance-art-inspired approach to the instrument” -Chicago Tribune

“an artist with a vision” -Bandcamp Daily


Chicago cellist and composer Lia Kohl (Makaya McCraven, Whitney, Finom fka Ohmme, Circuit des Yeux, Steve Gunn, Claire Rousay, and Steve Hauschildt) today announced The Ceiling Reposes, her second full-length album will be out March 10th, 2023 via American Dreams Records.

Alongside the announcement Kohl shared lead single, “sit on the floor and wait for storms”, which showcases the album’s focus on samples of live radio broadcasts - bits of ads, music, weather reports, and news. Over a shimmering bed of cello, synthesizer, and kazoo,“this track contains fragments of a weather report which, transcribed, make the bones of a lovely and strange little poem,” says Kohl.

Thinking of these samples as “found lyrics”, Kohl asked a group of poets and lyricists (including Kurt Chiang, Alyssa Martinez, Elizabeth Metzger, Corey Smith, Macie Stewart, Marvin Tate, Karima Walker) to flesh out these bones, adding their own words in the spaces between the existing text. The poems will be released online and as a zine in conjunction with the album.

Curiosity for its own sake: this is at the heart of Lia Kohl’s work, which finds meaning where others might find none. Whether collaborating with some of independent music’s biggest names, improvising music around the world, or exploring intimacy with multimedia performance art, Kohl builds webs of connections along paths less traveled. The Ceiling Reposes builds upon her solo releases Too Small to be a Plain, on Shinyoko/Artist Pool, and Untitled Radio (futile, fertile), on Longform Editions. Here, Kohl expands her twin practices of layering improvisations to create music and incorporating these layers within found sounds. She took hours of live radio samples recorded primarily on Vashon Island in Washington State, choosing select moments – bits of weather reports, prayers, talk shows, ads, and music – to elaborate on with her own recordings.

The world of radio is ripe with possibility, holding both the mundanity of ads and news with moments of profound beauty or weight. Near the end of track 1, “in a specific room,” a snippet of Bobby Vinton’s “Roses are Red (My Love)” is followed by a voice saying, “we don’t know how much time we have left on this earth”; their juxtaposition forms an oddly touching love song. Later in the album, a twanging banjo and a medieval lute give lively dueling performances, one station away from each other. Kohl’s samples speak to each other in uncanny ways as she deftly weaves between stations, crafting a web of meaning that’s just out of reach. She uses the radio as an instrument, certainly, but also as a way of reaching toward the unknown. There’s an oracular, searching quality to the way she moves through radio stations and invites us to search with her.

While the radio is the point of departure, The Ceiling Reposes is rich with layered instruments – cello, synthesizers, voice, kazoo, piano, drums, bells, wind machine and more. Kohl recorded some instruments in the studio, elaborating on or mimicking the radio or each other. Others she captured outdoors, adding birdsong, rehearsal chatter or the sound of waves to the music. Albums are often made in layers, but Kohl holds these layers up for us to hear clearly, reminding us that every sound – whether radio waves, train horns or the direct output of a synthesizer – is in its own space and time. These layers elide and collide, creating a cohesive picture or blurring into double vision, giving the sense that we are in multiple times and spaces at once.

Kohl invites us to time travel. Collecting sounds from multiple moments – a truck backing up, blaring a persistent, repetitive C, layers perfectly on a man whistling on the radio – she orchestrates a chamber music of layered experiences, like a map of time made of fruit roll-ups. Kohl revels in the coincidences she finds, making one now into many and back into one.

The Ceiling Reposes is out March 10, 2023 and is available to preorder now via American Dreams here.





Lia Kohl
The Ceiling Reposes
American Dreams
10 March 2023


Tracklist
1. in a specific room
2. sit on the floor and wait for storms
3. when glass is there, and water,
4. or things maybe dropping
5. the moment a zipper
6. became daily today
7. like time (pretending it had a human body)

Announced Shows
January 17 - Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (w/ Katinka Kleijn)
February 16 - Co-prosperity Sphere, Chicago, IL (w/ Zander Raymond)
February 18 - Constellation, Chicago, IL (w/ Macie Stewart)
March 2-5 - True/False Fest, Columbia, MI
March 17 - Zebulon, Los Angeles, CA
March 18 - Bandcamp Headquarters, Oakland, CA
March 20 - Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR
March 21- Sunset Tavern, Seattle, WA
April 1 - Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee, WI (w/ Elizabeth Metzger)

Links
liairenekohl.com
instagram.com/hurdigurdi
american-dreams.zone
liakohl.bandcamp.com