Itasca Tickets

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 LA in 2011. Though she began playing guitar at age 13, 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.