In 1967, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassinations, Pauline Oliveros left San Francisco to accept a teaching position in San Diego. “I felt the temper of the times,” she later told art historian Moira Roth. “Everybody was in an uproar and I began to feel a tremendous need to find a way to calm myself. The pressures were too great.” She described a spiritual crisis in which she didn’t want to play concerts and couldn’t think about composing, too distressed to return to normal with her practice. In the necessary break that followed, she found solace in the accordion, playing long, droning tones and singing gentle harmonies above them, often for hours at a time. This simple exercise gave rise to Sonic Meditations, an informal approach to group performance as well as a compositional method, whose sparse, beguiling text scores represent one of Oliveros’ lasting contributions to experimental music.
Watching Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart perform together, I am reminded of these text scores. In a recent video, the Chicago musicians sit facing one another, surrounded by boutique electronics. Johnson cues a drone from a vintage tape machine whose twisted ribbons stretch just beyond view. The three members lock eyes and begin to bow long notes across their instruments, singing softly as they play. “Have you ever heard the sound of an iceberg melting?” “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” As if prompted by these textual cues, the trio’s improvisations—which form the basis of the video performance, as well as of BODY SOUND, their collaborative debut album as a group—return to familiar tropes in experimental music with a soothing poise and focus that feel completely new.
The album is preceded by years of collaborative material in different formations, as well as with others from throughout Chicago’s rock and classical scenes. As Matchess, Johnson has worked with Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr, Bitchin’ Bajas’ Rob Frye, and Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella, recently collaborating with Kohl on a series of dizzying electroacoustic pieces titled For Translucence. Johnson, the group’s violist, and Kohl, their cellist, both appeared on Stewart’s 2025 album When the Distance Is Blue, which followed years of frenetic material from the violinist and multi-instrumentalist as one half of the art-pop duo Finom (formerly Ohmme). With releases on Drag City, International Anthem, and Owen Ashworth’s Orindal Records, the three musicians would seem to have a finger in nearly every aspect of the city’s vast DIY community, even as their collaborative output strays closer to the ethereal ambience of releases on Kranky or Thrill Jockey than those of the rock and jazz labels mentioned above. On BODY SOUND, this community-minded spirit coalesces into a series of improvisational recordings that feels like a major triumph within their respective catalogs.
The record starts softly, expanding outward from steady footing at the smallest scale. Kohl begins with a single note on the cello, which she sustains across much of “dawn | pulse,” the first piece. Yet from this droning tonic, a rich world blooms. Stewart and Johnson each enter above Kohl, orbiting around a single chord as they move to other tones within the scale. Sonorous tape loops swell and recede throughout the piece, and the trio sings breathy, open notes that persist throughout much of the composition’s second half. There’s a quiet grandeur to the opener that, much like Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring or the pastoral traditions it is based on, basks in the immediate pleasure of harmonic simplicity. And as with Copland’s ballet score (which, at times, has been called socialist realist), the piece’s plainspoken nature conceals a deeper complexity that is revealed as the collection unfolds.
While their improvisations are typically organized around underlying drones, the three musicians also deploy a striking variety of techniques. On “laundry | blood,” Kohl introduces a short pizzicato pattern that is paired with a bellowing, tightly voiced chord, and later vocal lines from her groupmates. “Chewing gum” and “snow | touch” both expand outward from grainy tape recordings that slowly come into focus, while “burning | counting (sleeping)” announces its arrival with a thick cluster of bowed harmonics that initially resemble tape loops—if only until the individual parts diverge, each performer’s contribution growing increasingly strident. Situated between two of the album’s softest pieces, the track bleeds boldly into the red, its dissonant pattern rising, falling, and rising again with the start of another fast-paced passage. The album seems to resist legibility at every turn; phrases that emerge slowly are later abandoned in under a minute, as the trio moves from sound to sound together, often landing far away from the original theme or idea.
Yet to sift through the album as a collection of ideas is to wholly miss the point. Like its title suggests, BODY SOUND prioritizes subconscious impressions over the kind of lofty chin-scratching you might encounter elsewhere in classical or experimental music. With her Sonic Meditations, Oliveros recognized that sound can be restorative in moments of personal crisis, and that making music together, however unpolished or plainspoken, is one of the great pleasures of a life lived in the company of others. Building on their work as individuals, where their training sits comfortably in the background of tactile experiments with synths and tape machines, the trio returns to Oliveros’ central insight. Together, they remind us how nourishing collaboration can be.
