Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart have shared laundry | blood, the latest single from their debut trio album BODY SOUND, out March 20th via International Anthem. The track arrives alongside a live performance video directed by Derrick Alexander, filmed at The Land School in Chicago.
The album version of “laundry | blood” opens with a near-waltz percussive tumble — a tape loop built from Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello — whose soft, eerie triplet momentum draws a deep, snarling drone of viola, cello, and violin into focus. It calls to mind the doomier reaches of the Berlin School and the repetitive outsider grandeur of Tony Conrad & Faust’s Outside the Dream Syndicate: darkly cinematic and unhurried, with the feel of a barely visible night train grinding through the dark.
The live video captures the piece’s atmosphere with striking immediacy, offering a window into how the trio translates this material in real time — no small thing for such a rich and profoundly nuanced sonic journey.
We first covered the trio’s formation back in August, when they shared debut single “Stone Piece I”, followed by a live performance film in December. BODY SOUND was assembled across sessions at International Anthem’s Iron Street studios, Shirk Studios in Chicago, and Boyd’s Jig and Reel in Knoxville during this year’s Big Ears Festival, with engineer and co-producer Dave Vettraino shaping the recordings before the trio edited and reshaped them by using “multiple analog tape machines to create loops that open up new pathways of improvisation, allowing them to reimagine and layer their intuitive material into meticulously crafted compositions.”
The trio will perform live across the East Coast US, the UK at London’s Cafe OTO, and Europe this spring.
Pre-Order the album: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/body-sound
