When a musician goes for a concept that involves kaleidoscope-like arranging of musical and other audible bits and pieces into a coherent piece or pieces of music, she/he is usually confronted with quite an arduous task.
First of all, those bits and pieces have to be carefully researched and chosen, and even if you want to simply just throw them up in the air and see how they will arrange or re-arrange themselves, you need to understand them almost perfectly. Let alone if you want to have a specific placement for them within a certain piece of music.
Also, in the physical kaleidoscope, you do not necessarily need a connecting thread for it to be able to work, in music, that thread is quite essential.
That is why Chicago cellist and composer Lia Kohl, who has worked with the likes of Makaya McCraven and Steve Gunn, among others was confronting such an arduous task when she was trying to piece together her second album The Ceiling Repose’.
And piecing up is taken here in its literal meaning, as Kohl assembles, arranges, and re-arranges pieces of almost everything audible – from music samples to ads and news snippets into coherent pieces of music.
To do that Kohl didn’t simply let these audible sounds arrange themselves, but she tried and succeeded in giving them some true sense by arranging them in a certain order and also connecting them with composed musical elements that run as a connecting thread through each of the compositions themselves.
The results are no less than brilliant, as Kohl’s musical/sound bite kaleidoscope truly works.
