I’ve been listening to this wee 16-minute album a bunch recently and wanted to capture some thoughts:
Lia Kohl – Various Small Whistles And A Song
All tracks are only a minute long, but I find them … legit? Substantial? Yet if I wrote something only a minute long I would worry about that. I’d think to myself it’s at best an interlude unless I extended it out further. Why? Since when? Kohl’s coming up with an explicit rule to help her be creative, my internalised one is, to my mind, a limit with no great value I didn’t even know I’d placed on what I do.
As well as the length, Kohl’s set herself another explicit constraint, as per the album title: the first 15 tracks have some kind of field recording of a whistle, and the last has a field recording of a song (karaoke of a Queen song recorded from outside the room? Pretty funny…). I like these kind of constraints, quite simple and still quite open. It’s part of why I at least look at the Disquiet Junto assignments every week, even when I don’t do them.
There’s also another layer here I’m interested in, which is that the album is a pretty direct a response to an art book that Kohl came across, as described in the album notes you can read at the link at the top of this post. Again, I like it! It’s a reminder I could do something like that too: respond to some other art and make something.
So as well as enjoying the music and the cool things Kohl does within her simple constraints, it’s an album that makes me reflect on my own music and gets me buzzy about what I could be doing myself. Good times.
While I’m here, last night I came across another thing Kohl has done recently via my RSS feed and think it’s worth sharing. Album forthcoming on the forever-interesting contemporary jazz (really?) label International Anthem, who just put out the new Tortoise album and so on.