INTERVIEW // Heavy Tiny
Comfort Music’s Ian Mahanpour sat down with Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew to chat about their group Heavy Tiny
Heavy Tiny is joined by Graciela Gonzalez for Comfort Music on Thursday, July 11th.
Doors: 7 PM
Show: 7:30 PM
All Comfort Station show are free.
Heavy Tiny, as well as your guys’ solo work, uses a lot of field recordings. What draws you to them?
Lia: We really share an interest in field recordings as a record of a place. A lot of the recordings we use sound like a place—for example, a recording of a bird coupled with the sounds of traffic. It’s never just a single kind of sound, but whole environments that include many layers of sound.
It's like carrying a camera. It's not that you have different eyes to see with, but you are just tuned to your environment, or sense of place, in a different way. I’ve actually found that traveling can heighten this experience of place. Some of the field recordings that we've been using are from a recent trip to Japan. Because we were traveling, we became very attuned to our surroundings, more so than when we are back home. So we have a lot of recordings people who live there would find quite boring, but to us were novel.
Nick: Yeah, the trains all have little jingles there. They're way more robust than our little “ding dongs” in Chicago. Every stop has its own tune that plays for about eight seconds. So we were just eating it up at every train stop, recording everything. Those kinds of sounds are a real indicator of the identity of a place.
I'm also interested in the ways in which all of these non-musical sounds intersect with our musicianship. How does my experience of the sounds of Chicago converge with my improvisatory practice? How does the quietness of the St. Paul suburbs, where I grew up, shape my experience of silence and space? There's all these ways in which non-musical sounds act on us and, by extension, on our music.
Lia: Sometimes, actually, I'm tuned toward a specific thing rather than a place. For a while I was making a lot of recordings of anthropogenic sounds (sounds from humans) such as fridge drones, car horns, things like that. So I was listening for things rather than places, especially for scenarios where multiple layers of sounds would be happening at the same time. An ice cream truck and a car alarm, for example.
But in terms of Heavy Tiny, I think right now it's almost more about the instrument setup as an environment rather than the emitted sounds. Not that it's not about the sounds, but the starting point of our musical process is more about a shared table of instruments that we draw from.
Nick: The table of instruments includes our phones connected to Bluetooth speakers that we play field recordings off of, bells, xylophones, a megaphone, walkie-talkies, and a melodica. Oh, and this toy called a happy apple. It's just bells inside a plastic apple. We have them in between us and the idea is to play them family style—we can both touch everything. Circling back to environmental sounds, a big part of Heavy Tiny’s setup is its interaction with the sounds of the space that we're in. Comfort Station is a super porous space, especially when playing outdoors in the middle of that traffic circle. So it's all about environmental sound, but particularly how our instruments interact with the broader sound world.
Photo credit Ricardo Adame
Why the focus on environment?
Lia: I would hope that the environmental aspect of Heavy Tiny would create an expanded ability to listen for the audience.
Nick: Yeah, I agree with that for sure. We’ve had two performances in the last month and at both of them people came up to us and said there were moments where they were unsure if a sound was being played by us or coming from the space we were in. These moments are a powerful invitation to listen bigger and figure out what that might mean for you. I think if you stretch your ears a little bit every time you listen to something, there are all sorts of things to discover.
You enumerated some pretty quirky instruments as part of Heavy Tiny’s arsenal. Why choose to play those objects as opposed to others, such as the ones you’ve been classically trained on?
Lia: One of the organizing principles of Heavy Tiny is that we play objects that we can both use. Normally, Nick plays trombone and electronics and I play cello and my own synthesizers; so we have our own solo practices that are very practiced. But with Heavy Tiny, we were looking for things that could be easily shared and didn’t feel like they were mine or their instrument.
Nick: Yeah—it’s all stuff in our studio that we both felt like we could approach as equals. The work that we were making together when we started 10 years ago with Mocrep was thinking about this very same instrument-performer relationship; trying to use found objects, not as an act of avoidance of our practiced instruments, but as a positive exploration of other sounds. Heavy Tiny is a continuation of that approach.
We once tried a Heavy Tiny gig where I played trombone and she played cello. I was over here and she was way over there, and I think we want to shorten that distance both physically and musically. To really try and build something that's spontaneously collaborative.
Lia: I think that the shared setup is also about a shared listening. Here we are making this environment of sound collaboratively and also responding to the sounds that we're hearing together.
Could you elaborate on your collaborative history together?
Nick: When we first started working together in Mocrep, we played the music of other composers—much of whose work was about the instrument-performer relationship. Towards the end of my time with that group in 2018, Mocrep started devising our own things together—closer to performance art or theater. When we first worked together as a duo, the work was gallery based: videos, performance ephemera, and other visual stuff.
Lia: Yeah, we premiered a group of works in 2020 called Measures of Distance at Roman Susan. It was a collection of video, performances, and sculptures. Then we made a sound, video, and print installation at ESS in 2022. So again, it's about sound in space, but not as directly as it is with Heavy Tiny.
Nick: As a duo, we were always interested in translating sound into performance art or sculpture. It occurred to us six months ago that we never actually just played music together. We have this long history of making art, but none of that was just music.
Lia: Although in 2021 we did make a recording on Nick’s net label Ham Bag where we play a little Casio keyboard in our house. You're hearing the sound of the boulevard, a distant vinyl record playing, and then every 30 seconds we play da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da on the Casio. That happens for like 12 minutes. So very related to this work, but different.
Where does the name “Heavy Tiny” come from?
Nick: I think the name is a vibe. A lot of the objects that we're using are very small—we use a lot of little toys, speakers, and small instruments. We’ll hit a bell loudly, let it go to silence, and then listen to the birds outside. I think there's something about these little objects and the kind of gravity of “silence” that we're trying to hold. Something about that says “heavy tiny” to me.
Lia: We were actually talking about neutron stars the other day, which are these very dense stars. They're heavy, but they're really small—“heavy tiny,” if you will.
Nick: A lot of people think our name is “big little,” funnily enough. Someone in a recent show greeted us with “Big Little in the house!” It's interesting that it evokes this kind of paradox, even though it's not. Heavy Tiny is a thing that you can be.
Any pivotal musical experiences you two would like to share?
Nick: I often think about the first time I went to Elastic Arts. I was a freshman in college at the time and was going to see Mars Williams; he had a soprano sax with one of those whirly tubes jammed in the bell and he was just whipping it around. That was the moment I realized there was a whole community of people around experimental music. It was a social opening up for me—I found out I wasn’t the only one invested in this type of musical practice, something I really felt since I’m originally from the suburbs.
Lia: Over the last 10 years I’ve had these experiences where I realize that something I'm doing in my current practice connects to a much earlier love that, at the time, I didn't register as “musical.” Like tuning through the radio—I've always loved that.
And one of the most profound experiences of sound that I've had was when I was 10 years old and a Georgian choir came to visit my church. Georgian polyphonic music is different to Western choral traditions—they use a slightly different tuning and organize harmony differently. I didn't register the Georgian choir as a musical experience—at the time I felt it had nothing to do with being a cellist, my primary musical practice. Now that I'm not only a cellist anymore, I think those experiences of sound have really entered into my current music making.
Nick: I’d like to hop in with one more: part of the inspiration for the 2022 gallery show we did at ESS was from the pandemic activity of looking out the window a lot. There was this guy in Lia's neighborhood who would skateboard around with an electric guitar—just shredding with an amp strapped to his back—and a little bit of Doppler effect could be heard as he skated by our window. It was a really wonderful intervention in our pandemic soundscape that I think shifted something for me in terms of how I think about music and our environment. Obviously I don’t do what he does, but that idea of music just zipping by you is really lovely.
In your duo’s bio it says you are interested in “sound as object and collaborative act.” Could you deconstruct this phrase for us?
Lia: Nice phrase. Did you write that, Nick?
Nick: I don’t remember, but I like it.
Lia: The thing I picture when I hear that phrase is also the thing I experience when we play together, which is that we're holding something in between us. I'm picturing a big yoga ball. We construct this environment together and hold it up like an object. I think very sculpturally about sound and I feel Heavy Tiny really speaks to that. We're creating a thing for people to be in.
Nick: When I think about sound as an object, I often have the experience of playing with blocks. We have our field recordings—that's one block—and then we have this instrument which is another block. It’s all about the semantic quality of a certain block and how that meaning is reconfigured as it’s placed adjacent to a different one.
Lia: And because we're doing it together, I can actually take away one of the things you've decided to put in and replace it with something else. We are building this environment that neither you or I could anticipate by ourselves.
Nick: Yeah, totally. To take that thought a step further, I feel we are also collaborating with our field recordings in a way. We gratefully receive sound that's been made by other things and facilitate them talking to each other. There are multiple axes of collaboration happening and Lia and I are only two of them.
Much of your solo and collaborative work, including Heavy Tiny, is performed or recorded live. Do you two prefer that way of music making as opposed to working “out of time” in a studio setting?
Nick: I say this as someone who hunkers down in the studio and chips away at sound all day, but some really beautiful things can happen live because you are truly collaborating with the place that you're in—including both the acoustics of the space as well as the energy of the audience. After it’s all said and done, we're both primarily improvisers; I didn't find my sound by being in a studio, I found it through improvisation. That social environment of improvisation is just such a foundational part of our work.
Lia: Improvising is about entering a soundscape and thinking “what can I give to this conversation?” Music as conversation is a very important element of real-time improvisation, as well as for me personally; listening back to a track and iterating on it in a studio just isn't as artistically fulfilling.
Nick: Yeah, I think we're both interested in a sort of past-present convergence that can occur during a live improvisation. There's a different kind of temporality we access when we bring things like field recordings to a performance and have them interact with the larger ambience of the space. Many layers of time bounce around—like field recordings of past events and the serendipitous sounds of the present moment—in a way that I’d like to say is akin to time travel, but is at the very least just interesting to experience.
Is there anything special about this collaboration, Heavy Tiny, compared to other ones you’ve engaged in?
Nick: I'm in a group called Paradise Complete with my good friend Bryn Davis who lives in St. Paul, and so we make most things asynchronously—I record an improvisation and send it to them, and they improvise and send me one in return.
I also work with a group called Tallulah Bankheist, a duo with noise artist Hedra Rowan. But I think in all of these projects, including Heavy Tiny, we aren’t just the sum of all of our musical experiences, but something more than that. If I’m X and someone else is Y, we don’t arrive at X + Y; it’s more like Z. This kind of collective exploration towards an unknown third place is so thrilling for me.
Lia: Yeah, you really can't anticipate what that third place will be even if you know someone really well.
But to answer your question, there's very little I make that doesn't involve the cello. So I think that the “objectness” of Heavy Tiny is very different from other things I’ve made. It makes for different choices.
Nick: The decision to explicitly make music has marked off Heavy Tiny from our other collaborations, too. It demarcates a set of concerns, boundaries, and social customs—we'll go on stage, people will sit in the audience, we'll make sound, and then it'll be done. We think this format is very important for our project.
What’s next for Heavy Tiny?
Lia: We've actually been talking about our first Heavy Tiny show where our friend came up to us afterward and asked us when the record is coming out! It’s been kind of an open question between us, but some of the things we're interested in musically feel maybe antithetical to making an album. I don't mean to say we're not going to make an album, but we are considering other mediums that may serve the work better—maybe it's an album, maybe it’s a video work, or maybe it shouldn’t even exist outside of a live performance space.
Nick: We do have a show in October at Compound Yellow, so we've also been talking a lot about site specific performances. Some of the first ideas we had about Heavy Tiny were during a walk in LaBagh Woods, and there's still this idea kicking around in my head of performing in the woods—what if we sought out these different soundscapes and tried to play off them? We still have many questions about the spaces we want to perform in, and for me, that's what’s exciting about Heavy Tiny’s future.