The new album by a couple of close friends and fellow Chicagoans in Lia Kohl and Zander Raymond – which they completed remotely and released this week on the French label unjenesaisquoi – is built around field recordings made in spaces of transit, what Kohl calls ‘liminal spaces’ like bus stops and train stations, or on taxi journeys and so forth.
It’s familiar terrain for Kohl who from her debut album Too Small to be a Plain has incorporated radio static alongside the light waltzes and woozy drones of her cello, expanding the practice on The Ceiling Reposes where she flicked between radio stations out on Vashon Island in Washington State, curating snippets and quavers from an incongruous blend of weather reports, talk show segments, advertisements and musical interludes which animated her bowed strings plus a diverse jumble of instrumentation on piano and wind machine, concertina, kazoo and assorted synths, while she also added more restive or meditative airs to the smattering of local colour through snatches of birdsong and the crashing waves.
Variations on a Topography for the Radia network and the international transmission arts organisation Wave Farm layered full scans of the AM/FM radio spectrum, yet if these projects seemed to at least imply the passive voice, with Normal Sounds she placed herself at the heart of the action, hoping to live more in the moment as she embraced the mundane. As suggested by the track titles, Normal Sounds found her making a symphony out of ‘Car Horns’ alongside Patrick Shiroishi’s burnished saxophone or keeping time with Ka Baird on ‘Car Alarm, Turn Signals’ before she found herself in the back seat being seduced by Richard Elliot’s velvety smooth jazz. Other pieces both captured and made elliptical sense out of the hum of tennis court floodlights, the crunching of snow underfoot, ice cream truck jingles, tornado sirens and the anxieties and buckled seatbelts of an imminently landing plane.
She also indulged in Movie Candy with the guitarist Daniel Wyche and earlier this year contributed to Macie Stewart’s acclaimed album When the Distance is Blue, before issuing a ‘neophonic orchestral expression’ with her longtime collaborator Whitney Johnson, in which I discerned ambient hallmarks and the clangour of church bells, gusts of wind through an empty house or apartment and the suggestion of furtive tiptoeing down a basement stairwell, submerged baritone operatics like fragments from the Don Giovanni duet ‘LĆ ci darem la mano’ and banshee wails.
More recent and perhaps even more prescient than Normal Sounds or For Translucence, one afternoon during rush hour in the middle of May she summoned a ten-person ensemble which included the violist Stewart, the clarinetist Zachary Good and her fellow cellist Dorothy Carlos for the site-specific piece Music for Union Station, a one-off performance within the iconic Chicago rail terminal which suffused the Corinthian columns, marble floors and massive skylight not to mention the ears of bench dwellers and bustling passengers inside the station’s Great Hall.
Kohl over the eight tracks of In Transit is joined by Raymond, a visual artist and multi-instrumentalist who has previously collaborated with Matthew Sage and released a slew of inquisitive solo works. Grounded in modular synthesis, utilising the Moog Matriarch and monome norns while his most recent two-parter foregrounded Casio keyboards, his affinity for this kind of project is clear from past work like Secrets Of A Squirrel, which deliberately incorporated ‘unpleasant’ sounds like the din of the Chicago ‘L’ and the clanking of dishes in the sink plus courage left in a tree which is described as a ‘reflective ride’ inspired by ‘the sonic and physical experience of travelling by bike throughout a metropolitan landscape in winter, yearning for the sensation of the August sun’.
Here both artists play synthesizers with Kohl’s cello and Raymond’s accordion also serving to fortify the field recordings or else sweep them along. Characterised by a staticky weather report and a percussive knocking on wood, the album opener ‘This was in the’ proves redolent of the chugging waltzes and diffuse Americana of lacuna and parlor by more eaze, which she described as a kind of ‘left-field chamber music’, or the Books and their of-the-moment faux-aleatoric debut Thought for Food.
Bowed cello imbues ‘In the taxi’ with a patient if slightly doleful air, gazing out the passenger side until the click of car doors and seatbelts plus a revving engine seem to transmute the vision into something more rapt and upbeat. On the standout track ‘It’s lily season’ throbbing accordion and marching band rhythms are permeated by operatic arias at least until the piece finds its footing, which persists for only a moment before giving way to a stop-start jazz-inflected groove.
As one might expect from these two artists, the sound is gentle and enveloping but never short of a furtive melody or some surface interest. ‘What they said about’ trundles and burbles along at moments reminiscent of Sung Tongs by Animal Collective or the Gang of Four and Buddy Ross samples of the Blonde closer ‘Futura Free’. And on ‘A duck with green feet’ those mossy palmates are dangled over a dripping sink for a quick wash amid modular blips and beeps, until the atmosphere of the piece turns more meditative, almost with the resonance of a singing bowl before we head back out into the open air. At times the season feels autumnal or captures the crispness of high summer after a spattering of rain, on a record which is suffused with light like a pointillist bokeh image or komorebi, the Japanese term for the sun as it flickers through the leaves of a tree.
‘Later’ feels more poised with a hint of menace, a dichotomy between nimble keys and an amorphous low end or undercurrent at least until Kohl and Raymond break out the chimes in the manner of Vespertine with its ‘Frosti’ music boxes and celeste. Then warped electronics tangle with the frayed ends of Kohl and Raymond’s languorous cello and accordion on ‘Woven things rest’, which unfolds with the rural character of fiddle music or the urbanity of the bal-musette before In Transit draws to a close through ‘Not in the hand’ with its wood barn grandeur, fluttering birdsong and cicada crunch. In the end Lia Kohl and Zander Raymond tweak or rewind the very notion of ‘transit’ positing not a commuter hellscape or interminable waiting processes but a tender and amiable (making peace with the implacable and intractable) passing through.
