Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart today release their debut trio album, BODY SOUND, on LP, CD, and digital download via International Anthem (available on all streaming platforms April 8th). Alongside the album, the trio share a new streaming single, burning | counting (sleeping).
We’ve been following this project and recommend you watch the live performances (also included below) of stone | piece that we shared in December, as well as the more recent, darkly cinematic laundry | blood. Each instalment has deepened the sense of a group working at the outer edges of what string instruments, voices, and analog tape can do together — and the finished album delivers on all of that promise.
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. The trio then edited and reshaped the material by hand, employing multiple analog tape machines to create loops that open up new pathways of improvisation — layering intuitive material into meticulously crafted compositions. Track titles are adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
New single burning | counting (sleeping) captures the album’s push and pull between density and stillness. As Whitney Johnson explains: “We all like to push the limits of our instruments, and this piece walks the razor edge at times, maintaining tonality while blowing out the timbre and hitting the rhythm on the front edge of the beat until it almost wants to fragment, disintegrate.”
All three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration and cross-genre collaboration — Stewart’s recent International Anthem solo album When the Distance is Blue among the highlights — and their influences range as far as the mountains of Donegal, Midwestern basement noise, and the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list. But the heart of BODY SOUND is listening and reacting: deep, melancholy, and triumphant, it comes across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music.
The trio host a virtual Bandcamp listening party at 12pm CST today, and head out on tour next month across the East Coast US, with a hometown Chicago show, before dates in Europe and the UK.
Live Performances
Live Dates
April 22 – Pittsburgh PA – Mattress Factory
April 23 – East Meredith NY – West Kortright Center
April 26 – Philadelphia PA – First Unitarian Church, Side Chapel
April 27 – Baltimore MD – 2640 Space
April 28 – Kingston, NY – Tubby’s
April 29 – Portland ME – Washington Baths
April 30 – Brattleboro VT – Epsilon Spires
May 1 – North Adams MA – Tourists Welcome
May 2 – Brooklyn NY – Long Play Festival
May 7 – Chicago IL – Constellation
June 3 – Stockholm SE – Fasching
June 4 – Berlin, DE – Kieszalon @ Das Minsk
June 6 – London UK – Cafe Oto
June 9 – Poitiers FR – Conforte Moderne