Chiu, Jeremiah & Marta Sofia Honer: Different Rooms LP

*** OUT JUNE 20, 2025 ***

Different Rooms finds modular synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer returning to a collaboration that, with the March 2022 release of their critically-lauded duo debut Recordings from the Åland Islands, initiated an epically prolific run for both artists in their own rites. In the wake of performances to support Åland Islands, in 2023 Chiu toured the US opening for M83 and released the solo recording In Electric Time, an album of in-the-moment synth-based compositions captured on analog tape at LA’s Vintage Synthesizer Museum. During that time, Honer was busy doing strings and arrangements for recordings and performances by International Anthem artists Makaya McCraven and Daniel Villarreal; she also contributed viola to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, and various projects with Adrian Younge’s Linear Labs Orchestra, among many others. Chiu and Honer worked together with Ariel Kalma on the three-way collaborative album The Closest Thing to Silence that released in early 2024, just months before the LA trance-jazz supergroup SML, which is co-led by Chiu, released their groundbreaking self-titled debut album. This protracted, two year run of activity and growth for the two musicians crescendoed into a moment of opportunity for them to conceptualize and compose the new duo work that would become Different Rooms.

Different Rooms collects songs and musical motifs composed, edited, and collaged by Chiu and Honer in the weeks between late 2024 and early 2025. Except for pieces composed from improvisations recorded with Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson in 2023 (heard on forthcoming singles “Side by Side” and “Different Rooms,” respectively), most of the ideas were initially developed during live performances on the duo’s fall 2024 EU tour, then fully realized when they returned to their home studios to record, arrange, and shape the music into album form in the beginning of 2025.

About the process, Chiu and Honer say: “This record marks an evolution in our approach to studio production. Our studios are side-by-side. When we were writing this album, you might have found us tracking viola stacks in one studio while, in the other, we were writing through-composed themes and rearranging the material. Granular synthesis and tape manipulation are key tools we use to create variation and movement in a composition. This process often yields surprising results, capturing the emotion but expressing it in unexpected ways. It feels essential that we embrace a bit of chance.”

Contrary to how Åland Islands – with its interwoven field recordings and atmospheric improvisations captured in the hyperreal landscapes of an archipelago in the Baltic Sea – completely transported listeners to another place, with Different Rooms, Chiu and Honer say “we want this music to meet you where you are.” It’s a decidedly urban album; field recordings still have a presence, but they come from scenes on train platforms, city streets, and rooms in their home, painting a quotidian sonic image that blurs the line between what the listener hears in their own environment and what is on the record.

The sonic and temporal abstraction between what is performed in real-time versus what is recorded, manipulated, and collaged is perfectly encapsulated in the album’s title Different Rooms, which literally refers to the fact that the material was recorded in different spaces, while figuratively reminding us that our shared experience of present time is one that is asynchronous, historied, and complex.