{"title":"Macie Stewart","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"macie-stewart-when-the-distance-is-blue","title":"Macie Stewart - When the Distance is Blue","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-about\"\u003e'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLong-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best\u003cbr\u003etracks of the past five years transcendent.”\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e(Pitchfork)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003ca\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ch3 class=\"credits-label\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-credits\"\u003ereleased March 21, 2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll compositions by Macie Stewart\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMacie Stewart - piano, prepared piano, violin, voice, field recordings\u003cbr\u003eLia Kohl - cello\u003cbr\u003eWhitney Johnson - viola\u003cbr\u003eZach Moore - double bass\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePrepared piano with dimes, contact microphones, and guitar amp, recorded at Palisade Studios, Chicago, IL | April 2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePrepared piano with felt recorded at International Anthem Studios, Chicago, IL | Feb 2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eString improvisations and compositions played by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson, Zach Moore, and Macie Stewart at Comfort Station, Chicago, IL | January 2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eField recording for Tsukiji recorded at the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, Japan | March 2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eField recording of vocal improvisation for Stairwell (Before and After) recorded in a stairwell at the Philharmonie de Paris in Paris, France | June 2023\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eField recording for Disintegration recorded at Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan | March 2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEngineered and Mixed by Dave Vettraino\u003cbr\u003eMastered by David Allen\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBio contributions by Audrey Steiner\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlbum Art \u0026amp; Design by Zander Raymond\u003cbr\u003eAdditional Layout Design by Aaron Denton\u003cbr\u003eInsert Photo (top) by Macie Stewart\u003cbr\u003eInsert Photo (middle) by Shannon Marks\u003cbr\u003eInsert Photo (bottom) by Dave Vettraino\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ch3 class=\"license-label\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cdiv id=\"license\" class=\"info license\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"cc-icons commercial\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003eall rights reserved\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"International Anthem","offers":[{"title":"Limited Edition \"Glacial Blue\" Color Vinyl LP","offer_id":53919303401813,"sku":"IARC0093LPI","price":25.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"Classic Black Vinyl LP","offer_id":53919317426517,"sku":"IARC0093LP","price":22.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD - Compact Disc","offer_id":53919309300053,"sku":"IARC0093CD","price":12.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1049\/0419\/6437\/files\/a2784680489_10.jpg?v=1779882707"},{"product_id":"whitney-johnson-lia-kohl-macie-stewart-body-sound","title":"Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart - BODY SOUND","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-about\"\u003eWhitney 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). 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\u003cspan class=\"bcTruncateMore\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ereacting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhere will the improvisation take place?\u003cbr\u003eHow will that space shape the sounds being made?\u003cbr\u003eHow will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?\u003cbr\u003eHow will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?\u003cbr\u003eCan it feel different-yet-equally perfect?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino 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 Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad \u0026amp; Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcross the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos \/ Reich.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003ca\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ch3 class=\"credits-label\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"tralbumData tralbum-credits\"\u003ereleased March 20, 2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhitney Johnson viola, voice\u003cbr\u003eLia Kohl cello, voice\u003cbr\u003eMacie Stewart violin, voice\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTascam 58, Revox A77, Sony TC 580, TEAC 6600, Portastudio 414mkII\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll music by Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart\u003cbr\u003eProduced by Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart, and Dave Vettraino\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEngineered by Dave Vettraino at IARC studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Big Ears Festival 2025 (Knoxville), and Shirk Studios (Chicago)\u003cbr\u003eMastered by David Allen\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArtwork courtesy of Jovencio de la Paz and Chris Sharp Gallery\u003cbr\u003eDesign \u0026amp; layout by Matilde Santiago\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ch3 class=\"license-label\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cdiv id=\"license\" class=\"info license\"\u003e\n\u003cspan class=\"cc-icons commercial\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003eall rights reserved\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"International Anthem","offers":[{"title":"Limited Edition \"Grapefruit\" Color Vinyl LP","offer_id":53920279298389,"sku":"IARC0108LPI","price":25.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"Classic Black Vinyl LP","offer_id":53920279429461,"sku":"IARC0108LP","price":22.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD - Compact Disc","offer_id":53920279560533,"sku":"IARC0108CD","price":12.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1049\/0419\/6437\/files\/a1705246381_10.jpg?v=1780048668"}],"url":"https:\/\/international-anthem.k7store.com\/collections\/macie-stewart.oembed","provider":"International Anthem","version":"1.0","type":"link"}