Union Station’s Great Hall/Photo: Todd Hieggelke
For centuries, visual and musical artists have used the sights and sounds of nature—waterfalls, running streams, birds singing—as inspiration. The works of Lia Kohl, however, find beauty in urban sounds that many see as a nuisance—like car alarms, turn signals, ice cream trucks—and incorporate them into her artistic vision. She creates and performs sonic landscapes incorporating cello, synthesizers, field recordings, visual images and live radio, exploring the mundane and profound possibilities of sound. Her unique and original vision has led to performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Symphony Center and artistic exchange programs across four continents.
“We live in a sonically overcrowded world, and I have trouble tuning sounds out,” Kohl says from her home in Chicago. “And so my way of responding to that is trying to find the beauty in those sounds and kind of responding to them. I love finding interest in everything sonic around me,” Kohl continues, “but especially the kind of mundane sounds, perhaps those that some even find annoying, that most people ignore or zone out.”
Born in New York City and raised in San Francisco, Kohl arrived in the Midwest to study classical cello and music theory at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. After stints living in New York and Berlin, she arrived in Chicago in 2013 to study cello under John Sharp, the principal cellist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Yet Kohl’s intellectual curiosity, combined with inspiration from Chicago’s musical community, led Kohl to begin exploring new venues.
“When I moved to Chicago, I started playing with people who were playing new music, playing a lot of contemporary classical music, and I started playing with improvisers, as there is a wonderful free music community here,” Kohl says. “So I started playing a lot of free improv, and I guess between my new friendships and my own interests, I found out that while I still love classical music, I wanted to make my own work too.”
Some of Kohl’s recordings include “Normal Sounds,” “Variations on a Topography,” and a collaborative album, “Movie Candy,” with Daniel Wyche. Kohl also incorporates photography and video installations in her work. In March 2019, Kohl, in collaboration with fellow cellist Katinka Kleijn, used the pool at Chicago’s Eckhart Park as a staging area for “Water on the Bridge,” in which she incorporated images of up to thirty cellos floating in various shapes and forms in the pool. Another collaboration with Kleijn is the installation “Augmented Geology,” which includes images of cellos being filled with concrete, burned by the sun, and stacked one on top of another in a landscape resembling the Joshua Tree.
Lia Kohl/Photo: Leah Wendzinski
“I did that project with Katinka Kleijn, who is also a cellist with the CSO,” Kohl says. “I think we both have this interest in ‘what is this object that we have so much attachment too?’ and how can we explore the relationship with the object and not just what it does. It is sort of human body size,” Kohl continues, “and it is this thing both of us have been carrying around since we were children.”
Kohl’s latest performance will be “Music for Union Station,” with fellow artists Dorothy Carlos, Zachary Good, Gerrit Hatcher, Riley Leitch, Nick Meryhew, Beth McDonald, Zach Moore, Jason Stein and Macie Stewart on Thursday, May 15. The performance will take place in the massive stone structure originally envisioned by Daniel Burnham and ultimately completed by Graham, Anderson, Probst and White in 1925.
“The inspiration for the show came when I was waiting for the Amtrak. They were playing canned pop music over the loudspeaker, and I was struck by how beautiful the music sounded in that reverberant space,” Kohl says. “So I started thinking about the space and how beautiful live music would sound in it, and how I can transform this into something live and dynamic. So I have ten musicians,” Kohl continues, “who are all wonderful musicians and improvisers who will be moving around the space. There will be people in the balconies, people moving around on the main floor—so the audience will be able to move among the musicians—but there will also be people just waiting for the train. So it will be a cool combination of intentional audience members and train passengers.”
On May 25, Kohl will be premiering a new composition to honor saxophonist Mars Williams, who passed away from cancer in November 2023. A beloved member of the Chicago and world music community, Williams was a longtime member of bands including the Psychedelic Furs, Liquid Soul, Hal Russell’s NRG Ensemble and the Ken Vandermark Quartet. He also gained MTV fame playing saxophone on the hit songs “I Know What Boys Like” and the theme for the TV show “Square Pegs” as a member of pop/punk group The Waitresses.
“Over his career, Mars collected a large group of toy instruments,” Kohl says. “Some of them are little kazoos, little plastic keyboards, all kinds of things, and he would use them in performance. When he was dying, he donated them to the Experimental Sound Studio to be publicly available, which is a wonderful gift. So, to celebrate the opening of this archive, they commissioned me to make a piece. So it will be a trio,” Kohl continues, “using a group of the toys, performed by me and Katinka Kleijn and Macie Stewart, who also knew and loved Mars.”
“Music for Union Station” will be performed on Thursday, May 15, 6pm, in the Great Hall and throughout the station, 225 South Canal.
“Mars Williams’ ‘Toy Story'” will premiere May 25 at 2pm at the May Chapel in the Rosehill Cemetery at 5800 North Ravenswood. On May 24, “Music for Mars,” the seventieth birth-year/archive launch will take place at Constellation, 3111 North Western. There will also be an event honoring Williams at The Hungry Brain, 2319 West Belmont, on May 25.
