Tag Archive: Lia Kohl


…A major downtown transit hub, Chicago’s Union Station occupies an archaic building that is poorly designed, often crowded, and notoriously associated with delayed commuter trains. Sections of it are literally falling apart.
In May 2025, cellist Lia Kohl set up in Union Station’s Great Hall with nine other musicians from Chicago’s improvised / creative music scene for a free, 43-minute rush-hour set.
The instrumentation included cellos, bass clarinets, sax, trombones, tuba, and violin. The performance functions as a piece of sound art that combines slow-moving chamber music with the ambient noise of the space. Alongside strings, horns and reeds, one can hear voices, travelers walking by, luggage carts, and…

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BODY SOUND brings frequent collaborators Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart together in a string trio format. The album’s pieces are all based in improvisation, and they’re all shaped by the spaces they were recorded in, which included two Chicago recording studios and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. Engineer and co-producer Dave Vettraino helped out by manipulating tapes and sonically translating the unique qualities of the recording locations.
All of the pieces’ titles were drawn from Yoko Ono’s book of text scores, Grapefruit, and all consist of everyday items and actions. The compositions are intimate and delicate, yet they find ways to escape their confines, as if the musicians and their instruments are entranced and…

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