Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, & Macie Stewart Announce Debut Album

BODY SOUND Out March 20

Live Dates In US, UK & EU This Spring

Today Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart announce their debut album as a trio — BODY SOUND, out March 20th on LP/CD/DD, with album opener “dawn | pulse” out now on all music platforms. Additionally, the trio share details of tour dates across the East Coast of the United States, Europe, and UK starting in April. Details below.

Listen to “dawn | pulse” and preorder BODY SOUND here.

(( *BODY SOUND* cover art by Jovencio de la Paz ))

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.

Their influences are vast — dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a Midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is: listening and reacting.

The album’s lead single “dawn | pulse” is an undulating slow roller, a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.

BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s also part of an ongoing creative continuum, informed by the improvised music idioms of the trio’s hometown, Chicago, and includes track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.

International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino worked alongside the trio to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of the 2025 Big Ears Festival). Then Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart edited and reshaped the recordings by hand, employing multiple analog tape machines to create loops that open up new pathways of improvisation, allowing them to reimagine and layer their intuitive material into meticulously crafted compositions.

It was all done in response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect. The resultant music has inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality, with a sense of place that is both magical and realistic. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album — an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection — that manages to decode high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.

Listen to “dawn | pulse” and preorder BODY SOUND here.

In this recent film, director Derrick Alexander captures Johnson, Kohl and Stewart in the auditorium of The Land School in Chicago, doing a live take of "stone | piece" from BODY SOUND. The trio's instruments and voices are layered with analog tape loops to create a multidimensional abstraction of time and timbre, making a sound that lands somewhere on the outskirts of minimalist classical, modern improvisation, ambient and pastoral musics.

Watch.

LIVE DATES

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart trio

April 22 - Pittsburgh PA - Mattress Factory - tickets
April 23 - East Meredith NY - West Kortright Center - tickets
April 26 - Philadelphia PA - First Unitarian Church - tickets
April 27 - Baltimore MD - 2640 Space - tickets
April 29 - Portland ME - Washington Baths - tickets
April 30 - Brattleboro VT - Epsilon Spires
May 1 - North Adams MA - Tourists Welcome
May 2 - Brooklyn NY - Long Play Festival - tickets
May 7 - Chicago IL - Constellation
May 27-June 2 - TBC shows in EU
June 3 - Stockholm SE - Fasching
June 4 - Berlin, DE - Kieszalon @ Das Minsk
June 6 - London UK - Cafe Oto
June 9 - Poitiers FR - Conforte Moderne

DELUXE VINYL PACKAGE

BODY SOUND comes on a 140 gram vinyl LP, inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket with IARC obi strip and poly-lined printed inner-sleeve. Lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST, and pressed at Pallas in Germany.

Limited Edition *Grapefruit* Color Vinyl - $29
Classic Black Vinyl - $25

also available on
Compact Disc - $15

Purchase via our Bandcamp page today!

!!! WINTER '26 BUNDLE IS HERE !!!

Extra Stars is the first of two new physical releases we'll be releasing this winter season. The Winter ‘26 Bundle collects both into a single parcel. Purchase gets you a bundle-exclusive discount of 10% off the LP prices as well as a discounted shipping cost.

Included in the Winter '26 Bundle:

IARC0107 (Gregory Uhlmann - Extra Stars)
IARC0108 (Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart - BODY SOUND)

Bundles will ship from our warehouses in the US, EU, and UK, but don’t wait too long, the quantity available in each warehouse is limited! Early purchase is recommended to ensure the lowest possible shipping, tax, and VAT costs. All items will ship together in one package around March 20th. Bandcamp downloads will be sent via email for all the releases by, or before, the ship date.

ORDER THE WINTER '26 BUNDLE on
limited edition color vinyl here

ORDER THE WINTER '26 BUNDLE on
classic black vinyl here