Itasca

Itasca serves as the performing alias for indie folk artist Kayla Cohen, whose delicate vocals and fingerstyle playing evoke the softer side of the classic singer/songwriter period along with echoes of age-old traditional ballads. Cohen began playing guitar at thirteen and first explored noise and drone textures before focusing on her fragile, warmly hued folk approach. While still based in New York she issued several cassettes and CD-Rs under her given name. Following her move to Los Angeles she launched the Itasca project with the self-recorded solo album Grace Riders on the Road in 2012. Her next effort, the home-recorded Unmoored by the Wind, came out on Matt Mondanile’s New Images imprint in 2014, while the eight-song instrumental cassette Ann’s Tradition surfaced the following year on Perfect Wave.

Open to Chance, her 2016 release on Paradise of Bachelors, marked the first time she presented her airy acoustic material with a full band. The label later put out the stylistically consistent Spring in 2019. On her subsequent album, Imitation of War, Cohen altered her sonic palette while retaining her hazy, breathy aesthetic; the 2024 set leaned toward electric guitars and a denser, more psychedelic atmosphere reminiscent of the late 1960s. Robbie Cody of Wand and Cordovas engineered and co-produced the record, which placed Cohen on guitar alongside rhythm-section players drawn from Wand and Gun Outfit.