Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart
About a decade ago, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart, and Whitney Johnson—three essential string players, composers, collaborators, and improvisers within Chicago’s tightly knit but also sprawling music scene—rendezvoused for a one-off performance at the city’s Elastic Arts. They recognized in the moment a musical camaraderie, the way that the cello, violin, viola, and their three voices could cohere in sudden harmony and splinter into surprising arrays. They decided to tend to that relationship, playing every year or so until they finally accepted the obvious: This was a real project, worth pursuing. That epiphany led to more shows and sessions, including two improvisational recording stints in Chicago studios and a surprise set at Boyd’s Jig and Reel during Big Ears 2025. They took those reels and, in turn, improvised with them, creating loops and layering them and adding tape effects to create their spellbinding 2026 debut, Body Sound.
The 11 tracks of Body Sound are beautiful and brittle, enormous and elliptical. Where opener “dawn | pulse” is an invocation that rises like the sun or your dreams, “shadow | mess” feels stuck in a Sisyphean reality, any sense of forward motion slowly sliding back on itself. Their voices rise, fall, and twist among pizzicato strings through “paper folding | disappearing,” while everything seems to merge in closer “fog | mirror,” all the threads becoming one. Onstage, the trio maintains the approach that led them to a consistent practice together and to their debut—improvising with their instruments and one another, responding to the room and their relationship in real time, moving through modes and moods as they collectively see fit, the tape always spooling nearby.
