Albums and Artifacts
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 poetic, out-of-time recordings as Itasca—refined over the course of several releases, including three for Paradise of Bachelors—reflect 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.
Open to Chance, Itasca’s 2016 album on Paradise of Bachelors, was her first to feature a full band, including pedal steel player and frequent collaborator Dave McPeters, drummer Coleman Guyon (and occasionally Kacey Johansing), and bassist and vocalist Julia Nowak.
Cohen wrote the anticipated follow-up to Open to Chance in a century-old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Inspired by the landscape and history of the Four Corners region, the sublime Spring (2019)—its title summoning both season and scarce local water sources—dowses a devotional path to high desert headwaters. Featuring contributions from Chris Cohen, Cooper Crain (Bitchin’ Bajas), James Elkington, and members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw, Spring contains Cohen’s most quietly dazzling and self-assured set of songs to date.
On Imitation of War (2024), her stunning third record with Paradise of Bachelors, Cohen advances Itasca into rockier terrain, with a suite of smoky nocturnes and uneasy idylls surveying, with refreshing urgency, mythologies and psychologies both classical and personal. Co-produced by Robbie Cody(Wand, Behavior), these ten sturdy set-pieces represent the loosest, leanest, and most smolderingly electric guitar-forward recordings of Cohen’s deepening catalog.
Videos
News
Itasca: Imitation of War – Out Now
Itasca's stunning new album, her first in nearly five years,...
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Itasca Returns with Imitation of War
Itasca advances into rockier terrain, with Kayla Cohen's most smolderingly electric...
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Uncut Presents: The Paradise of Bachelors Sessions.
We're thrilled to partner with our friends at Uncut Magazine...
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Nap Eyes Are “So Tired.”
In the proud tradition of improvisatory, languidly unfolding self-interrogative Nap...
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Acknowledgments
Cohen’s got a voice that glows like the sun at dusk, and plays guitar with a nimble yet intricate touch.
– NPR
Simultaneously haunting and heavenly … shimmers with an eternal mystery.
– MOJO
Cohen’s most salient talent is evocation—trapping place, weather, and physical presence like a butterfly pinned beneath glass.
– Pitchfork
The mellow glow [her music] generates is reason enough to want to bask in its evanescent light for as long as life’s harsher aspects can conceivably be held at bay.
– NPR
It all suggests the balm of a gentle breeze beneath the bright sunlight, a feeling you’d want to capture indefinitely. Cohen does exactly that, suspending an instant in eternal amber. She is able to conjure up something resembling transcendence.
– Pitchfork
Simultaneously spare and complex, observational folk ballads turned psychic and strange by metalstringed dissonance and troubling Symbolist metaphor.
– MOJO
Itasca’s old-soul vocals and antique acoustic guitar conjure up classic folkies from years past like Vashti Bunyan.
– Vogue
Contact
BOOKING: USA – contact artist; Int’l: DJ Fitz, Vagabond Booking
