In the summer of 1966, Morton Feldman—a composer known for mournful elegance and minimalist restraint—was feeling kvetchy. In a freeform conversation with John Cage at New York’s WBAI studios, he griped that a recent trip to the beach had been spoiled by the proliferation of transistor radios “blaring out rock’n’roll.” Cage, ever philosophical, was more circumspect. “Well, you know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment?” he asked his friend and fellow avant-gardist: He simply composed a piece using radios. Now whenever he heard the din of clashing broadcasts in public, he continued, chuckling: “I think, well, they’re just playing my piece.”
The Chicago cellist and composer Lia Kohl cited Cage and Feldman’s conversation in a recent interview, with good reason: Her music represents a similar rapprochement with the racket of everyday life. On her 2023 album The Ceiling Reposes, she lifted snippets from the airwaves—drive-time chatter, weather forecasts, stock-market reports—to use as accidental counterpoints to contemplative cello improvisations and atmospheric synth sketches. She goes further on Normal Sounds, extending her net to catch all manner of noises (buzzing fridges, tinkling ice-cream trucks, honking car horns) that she mixes into a richly tonal, patiently melodic electroacoustic blend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this kind of quotidian found sound, particularly in electronic music. The late Peter Rehberg, collaborating with Vienna’s General Magic, placed contact mics on a refrigerator to create 1995’s winking Fridge Trax. Matthew Herbert turned to kitchen utensils and toothbrushes on 1998’s Around the House; Matmos sourced every note on 2016’s Ultimate Care II out of a Whirlpool washing machine. But Kohl—who calls her album “a love letter to the mundane sonic world, to the part of my brain that just can’t stop listening to everything, all the time”—takes a different approach from her predecessors.
Rehberg & General Magic and Matmos remained faithful to the throbbing, buzzing thingliness of their machines; Herbert swirled his source material into tastefully jazzy house until its provenance was largely moot. Kohl’s approach is less transformative and more literal. Even if it weren’t for titles like “Car Alarm, Turn Signal” and “Ice Cream Truck, Tornado Siren,” there’s a good chance that you could identify at least some of the sounds she uses. She makes no attempt to disguise the supermarket chimes of “Airport Fridge, Self Checkout,” or the flight attendant’s directions and nearby video-console bleeps on “Plane.” Instead, she uses them as creative prompts for her own writing, playing off what she overhears and finding music in the incidental, much the way Steve Reich exploited the musicality of his interlocutors in Different Trains.
