Photo by Ella Andersson.

Photo by Ella Andersson.

We’re delighted to welcome Itasca, the musical project of Los Angeles-based guitarist and songwriter Kayla Cohen, to the Paradise of Bachelors family. Stay tuned for more details on a new album to be released in late 2016. In the meantime, Itasca will be touring the U.S. this May. Don’t miss a chance to experience their otherworldly music live (tour dates below).

Read more on Itasca’s PoB artist page. Listen to past releases on their Bandcamp page or Soundcloud, and check out the below recent live video and Grateful Dead cover (from the WFMU 2016 fundraiser compilation Songs to Fill the Air.)

“This feeling that we, as listeners, have been granted access into Itasca’s private inner sanctum is what helps give [Cohen’s music] its quiet gravity, and her ample instrumental skills and deft songcraft make this invitation well worth your while.”

– Matthew Murphy, Pitchfork

 

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SPRING 2016 TOUR DATES

May 18th – Denver, CO – Rhinoceropolis
May 19th – Omaha, NE – The Brothers Lounge
May 20th – Iowa City, IA – Governors Mansion
May 21st – Lafayette, IN – Spot Tavern
May 22nd – Columbus, OH – Cafe Bourbon St
May 23rd – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
May 24th – Brooklyn, NY – Union Pool
May 25th – New York, NY – WFMU
May 26th – Northampton, MA – One Bar
May 27th – Baltimore, MD – The Crown
May 28th – Philadelphia, PA – Ortlieb’s
May 29th – Richmond, VA – Black Iris
May 31st – Lexington, KY – Institute 193 (daytime solo show)
May 31st – Lexington, KY – Al’s Bar
June 1st – Nashville, TN – Fond Object
June 2nd – Asheville, NC – Static Age
June 3rd – Cincinnati, OH – TBA
June 4th – Detroit, MI – Trinosophes
June 5th – Chicago, IL – Elastic Arts
June 6th – Milwaukee, WI – Acme Records
June 7th – Madison, WI – Mickey’s Tavern
June 8th – Minneapolis, MN – Eagles Club 34
June 15th – Palm Springs, CA – Ace Hotel

*May 19–June 8 with David Kenneth Nance

BIO

Itasca is the musical identity of Los Angeles-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kayla Cohen. Just as the name itself is ambiguous—a 19th-century pseudo-Ojibwe place name and portmanteau of the Latin words for “truth” (veritas) and “head” (caput)—so too is Cohen’s musical project mutable and multivalent: fundamentally unconcerned with genre, but richly allusive of the hermetic worlds of private-press canyon-cult mystics and East Coast noiseniks alike.

Cohen, who grew up in New York state near the Hudson River, moved from Brooklyn to L.A. in 2011. Though she began playing guitar at age thirteen, her songwriting idiom emerged gradually from her longstanding noise and drone practice. Her out-of-time recordings as Itasca—refined over the course of several releases, including the acclaimed 2014 LP Unmoored by the Wind (New Images)—reflects both this dislocated geography and her Janus-faced gaze towards both baroque, acid folk-inflected songcraft and deconstructive, textural sonics.

Though deeply informed by the mythology and iconography of the modern American desert West, Cohen likewise finds kinship with a lineage of English iconoclasts such as Michael Chapman and Bridget St John. Her adept, fingerstyle guitar work—nimble but unshowy, always at the service of framing her plaintively unspooling modal progressions and gorgeous, moonlit voice—centers Itasca’s melancholy pastorales in a hazy, heat-mirage space equally suggestive of familiarity and distance, community and anomie.

Itasca’s upcoming 2016 album on Paradise of Bachelors is her first to feature the full band with whom she currently records and tours, including pedal steel player and frequent collaborator Dave McPeters, drummer Coleman Guyon (and occasionally Kacey Johansing), and bassist and vocalist Julia Nowak.

PHOTOS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gorgeous privately released acid folk reverie… This is a heady slice of lysergic ladies of the canyon, with the feel of tropical microdots that dominated the These Trails and Linda Perhacs sides given a slightly more baroque dream-time feel. Some of the guitar stylings have the kind of courtly appeal of Current 93 circa Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre, but when she gets into more complex vortices of steel strings she comes over like Robbie Basho circa Basho Sings. This one came out of nowhere and knocked us sideways.

– David Keenan, for Volcanic Tongue

The image of the solitary songwriter strumming away and singing her songs promises transparency, but a chief virtue of Itasca’s Unmoored By The Wind is that it doesn’t give up its secrets too easily.

– Bill Meyer, The Wire

Itasca shows a kind of total fluidity of delivery, where she sings anything she sings and the music slips and flows around her. Put it this way: once there was a song called “Walking In The Rain,” and that’s her style of playing now, too. The opening interlude and the instrumental passages here recall guitarist Peter Walker in contemplation—sharp, deliberate, suggestive in its minimalism—and, well, that’s Cohen’s voice, too, except for the sharp part. She’s more agile than Baier but just as direct.

-Chris Ziegler, LA Record

ARTIST LINKS