In the summer of 1966, Morton Feldman—a composer known for mournful elegance and minimalist restraint—was feeling kvetchy. In a freeform conversation with John Cage at New York’s WBAI studios, he griped that a recent trip to the beach had been spoiled by the proliferation of transistor radios “blaring out rock’n’roll.” Cage, ever philosophical, was more circumspect. “Well, you know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment?” he asked his friend and fellow avant-gardist: He simply composed a piece using radios. Now whenever he heard the din of clashing broadcasts in public, he continued, chuckling: “I think, well, they’re just playing my piece.”
The Chicago cellist and composer Lia Kohl cited Cage and Feldman’s conversation in a recent interview, with good reason: Her music represents a similar rapprochement with the racket of everyday life. On her 2023 album The Ceiling Reposes, she lifted snippets from the airwaves—drive-time chatter, weather forecasts, stock-market reports—to use as accidental counterpoints to contemplative cello improvisations and atmospheric synth sketches. She goes further on Normal Sounds, extending her net to catch all manner of noises (buzzing fridges, tinkling ice-cream trucks, honking car horns) that she mixes into a richly tonal, patiently melodic electroacoustic blend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this kind of quotidian found sound, particularly in electronic music. The late Peter Rehberg, collaborating with Vienna’s General Magic, placed contact mics on a refrigerator to create 1995’s winking Fridge Trax. Matthew Herbert turned to kitchen utensils and toothbrushes on 1998’s Around the House; Matmos sourced every note on 2016’s Ultimate Care II out of a Whirlpool washing machine. But Kohl—who calls her album “a love letter to the mundane sonic world, to the part of my brain that just can’t stop listening to everything, all the time”—takes a different approach from her predecessors.
Rehberg & General Magic and Matmos remained faithful to the throbbing, buzzing thingliness of their machines; Herbert swirled his source material into tastefully jazzy house until its provenance was largely moot. Kohl’s approach is less transformative and more literal. Even if it weren’t for titles like “Car Alarm, Turn Signal” and “Ice Cream Truck, Tornado Siren,” there’s a good chance that you could identify at least some of the sounds she uses. She makes no attempt to disguise the supermarket chimes of “Airport Fridge, Self Checkout,” or the flight attendant’s directions and nearby video-console bleeps on “Plane.” Instead, she uses them as creative prompts for her own writing, playing off what she overhears and finding music in the incidental, much the way Steve Reich exploited the musicality of his interlocutors in Different Trains.
The album opens with the buzzing, fluorescent glare of “Tennis Court Light, Snow,” harsh and grating; plucking and bowing at her cello, Kohl tempers its nagging ostinato and keeps pushing outward, sketching out an imaginary expanse that is eventually punctuated by footsteps crunching through snow. Kohl’s found sounds never feel gimmicky, thanks in large part to the intentionality with which she integrates them. When a fasten-seatbelt chime goes off, her overdubbed cellos answer in key, as though the overhead signal had inspired an impromptu performance of Terry Riley’s In C. In “Car Alarm, Turn Signal,” she mashes down the keys on her synth, creating gently dissonant tone clusters to match the ruckus of rush-hour traffic, then uses the perfect fifth of a car alarm’s nagging whee-ooo as the frame for a somber, contemplative cello passage. It’s remarkable: She finds meditative grace in the city’s most annoying sounds.
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between what’s found and what’s played, as her keyboard or her cello picks up an overheard melody and runs with it. You get the sense that she’s following the natural course of the music, teasing it out until it reaches its conclusion. Nowhere is that clearer than in the album’s final track, “Ignition, Sneakers.” For nearly five minutes, an automotive chime pings away at an incessant high F-sharp, while Kohl uses it as a kind of scaffolding for dubby synth chords and expressively bowed cello. Toward the end, the music fades away but the pinging remains, growing increasingly maddening; there’s a sense of palpable relief when she finally removes the key from the ignition and the tone goes silent, leaving only the reassuring murmur of birds in the background. It’s a canny way to close the album, bringing every aspect of the music into sharp relief. Even the sudden silence feels vivid.
