Lia Kohl

Lia Kohl is a Chicago based composer and cellist whose works blends modern classical with experimental music, especially wrt the way she integrates sounds of real world objects into her pieces. Her 2024 album Normal Sounds explores the musicality of car alarms, turn signals, checkout stands, and so on, as she sometimes augments them and other times, plays off of them with her synth and cello, while her previous album, 2023's The Ceiling Reposes is built around broadcast on a short wave radio. The tunes she develops are often contemplative and wistful, with an improvisational flow, though their presence ends up arguably giving her music a more relatable quality, at least for an average listener, as opposed to a piece conceived as pure concrete music.