*Announcing* Two IA11 Edition vinyl LPs out September 12th // Angel Bat Dawid's The Oracle and Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer's duo debut
*announcing*
IA11 Editions
Drop #3
As 2025 rolls on, we continue to celebrate our eleventh year (under the #IA11 chrysanthemum banner) by revisiting some of the most celebrated entries in our decade of releases.
These IA11 Edition LP packages are presented with new liner notes, new insert booklets, and the fresh 2025 redesign of our obi (c/o designer Aaron Lowell Denton). They are also set at a price point intended to make the albums more accessible than ever before. Today we are happy to announce the third drop in the series, two titles shipping direct and available in stores September 12th, 2025:
IMRC0023LP11
Angel Bat Dawid - The Oracle (IA11 Edition)
preview/preorder here
IARC0053LP11
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer - Recordings from the Åland Islands (IA11 Edition)
preview/preorder here
The two records are also available as a bundle
with discounted price for purchasing both albums together!
IMRC0023LP11
Angel Bat Dawid
The Oracle (IA11 Edition)
Angel Bat Dawid’s International Anthem debut The Oracle introduced her multifaceted voice to the world. The response to its modest, initial cassette/digital release in January of 2019 was immediate, and immense. Within a month of its announcement, Dawid was being featured on magazine covers and receiving offers from international festivals; and her subsequent activity marked the beginning of an epic run of creative output (including her critically-lauded 2020 LIVE album with Tha Brothahood, the same year's EP Transition East, 2021's Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol. 1 Doxology, and the sprawling opus Requiem for Jazz, released in 2023) that continues through the present moment (hear: Journey to Nabta Playa, her recently-released collaboration with Naima Nefertari).
The collection of compositions on The Oracle present a deep blend of powerful and emotive songs alongside heavy and free improvisation. In true DIY fashion, with pure presence and a spirit of creative abandon, Dawid recorded and mixed the album using only her cell phone, entirely. "Angel's fieldnote approach affirms that the everyday remains a legitimate site of creative production," says percussionist, collaborator, and IARC labelmate Asher Gamedze in his liner notes for the album's IA11 Edition.
Gamedze – the only other musician to appear on The Oracle besides Dawid, who constructed most of the album's tracks by layering, overdubbing, and arranging lo-fi symphonies of her own voice, wind instruments, percussions, and keyboards – waxes extensively about Dawid's significance in his notes, calling her "a living exemplar and extension of the spacious sonic horizons opened by the likes of the AACM and their refusal of any limitations on their creative vision and the destruction of the demarcation between composer and improviser."
Revisiting The Oracle, it's abundantly clear that it was Dawid’s artistic vision and compositional skill that pushed the scope of her explorations so far. It’s how, despite their sonic contrast, the layered delay-drenched clarinet improvisations of “Black Family” or “Impepho” sit nicely with the unadorned fly-on-the-wall majesty of “London” or the nearly sidelong freedom of “Capetown” (which documents her first-time meeting with Gamedze, at his home in South Africa). The laid-back minor key gospel-folk of Dawid’s vocal tunes tie The Oracle together and sit similarly comfortable within the sides of the record.
Gamedze gets to the essence when he writes: "The album's profundity perhaps lies in its everydayness. Its beauty is in the worlds and work which are the music's root. What I do know is that it is a joy that this album exists. An instant classic with anthems ancient to the future. A totally idiosyncratic and grounded orientation to technology and production. A refusal of the lines between composition and improvisation. A multi-layered collage of history, struggle, organising and travel, both physical and metaphysical."
The IA11 Edition vinyl LP features our IARC 2025 obi strip, plus a new 8-page 11x11" insert booklet with unpublished photos and new liner notes by Asher Gamedze.
IARC0053LP11
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer
Recordings from the Åland Islands (IA11 Edition)
Recordings from the Åland Islands, the 2022 duo debut by synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer, is a truly unique series of pieces that marry acoustic and electronic sounds with field recordings, all captured on a trip to the titular Baltic archipelago. Its release signaled another turning point for International Anthem, presenting a fresh take on the collage-based music that had become such a signature facet of the label's catalog while also establishing a close relationship with two artists who have since become pillars of the label's community.
That relationship started with mutual friends and years spent on the Chicago music scene, but fully blossomed after Chiu and Honer had already relocated to Los Angeles, where they would become critical builders of IARC's bridge between the two cities. By the time Åland Islands was coming to fruition, Honer had already written, performed and recorded strings with Makaya McCraven and Daniel Villarreal, but this project brought her to the front as a lead artist in her own right. Åland Islands was the label's first collaboration of any kind with Chiu, who has since released the solo outing In Electric Time and the genre-breaking debut of his co-led supergroup SML, in addition to a trio album with Honer and the late Ariel Kalma (2024’s The Closest Thing to Silence), and copious album art and sundry visual work for IARC from his graphic design chair (including the now-annual publication Tracing the Lines). And that’s not even mentioning Chiu & Honer’s sophomore duo album Different Rooms, which was released in June 2025 to wide critical acclaim.
Recordings from the Åland Islands is far more than its context within the world of IARC, however, and it’s certainly more than its context as a travel document. Here Chiu and Honer have created a new world out of an old one with work that sees them in dialogue with their own source material. Like early masterpieces by Franco Battiato or Alvin Lucier, the album repeatedly presents the listener with a palpable sense of place, only to pluck them up and drop them into an entirely new one.
Filmmaker Sean Pecknold, who accompanied Chiu and Honer on their first trip to the Åland Islands, sums things up beautifully in his liner notes for the IA11 Edition of the album: "Along with their music, they recorded field sounds of the island: the murmurings of our friends, the birds at dusk, an organ inside an ancient church, the hum of bike tires rolling across soft gravel, the Finnish PA announcement on the afternoon ferry. Every sound they threaded into their compositions became a countermelody to the fluttery layers of synthesizer and haunting strings. They were starting to define a new texture, a new tone, a new vision."
The IA11 Edition LP features our IARC 2025 obi strip, plus a new 16-page 11x11" insert booklet with unpublished photos from the recordings, new liner notes by Sean Pecknold, and an in-depth conversation between Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.
*ICYMI*
IA11 Editions
Drop #1
In case you missed it... our first batch of IA11 Edition vinyl LPs was released on March 28th. Copies of each are still available via your local record shop and/or our Bandcamp page! Links below.
IARC0001LP11
Rob Mazurek - Alternate Moon Cycles (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0003LP11
Makaya McCraven - In The Moment (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0017LP11
Ben LaMar Gay - Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun (IA11 Edition)
order here
*ICYMI*
IA11 Editions
Drop #2
Our second batch of IA11 Edition vinyl LPs was released on June 27th. Copies of each are still available via your local record shop and/or our Bandcamp page! Links below.
IARC0009LP11
Jeff Parker - The New Breed (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0014LP11
Irreversible Entanglements - Irreversible Entanglements (IA11 Edition)
order here
IARC0033LP11
Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Fergsuon - Chicago Waves (IA11 Edition)
order here
...about IA11...
On December 2nd, 2024, we marked the ten-year anniversary of our first release. With a full decade under our belt – ten years of commitment to a growing community of artists, and our original mission statement ("to vitalize demand for boundary defying music," among other things) – we've spent a lot of time thinking about how we'd like to celebrate this milestone. What we keep coming back to is: desire to use this opportunity to revisit and revivify music and memories from our first decade; but keeping true to our ethos of always looking forward, all the way.
In that spirit, across 2025, we'll be rolling out a series of releases and events under the #IA11 banner. Celebrating our eleventh year. Doing our best to retell essential, foundational stories from our past, while keeping our hearts and minds fixed on the present. Trying to establish new standards that can help carry our mission through another decade of work – and hopefully more.
We created an emblem for IA11 with a vibrating interpretation of a chrysanthemum as the central symbol. Aside from just loving the delicious golden nectar that comes from the leaves of this flower, for us, the image of the chrysanthemum resonates as a symbol of longevity and rejuvenation. Two of the driving intentions behind this IA11 effort.
Please stay tuned for more announcements about more special IA11 events and releases across 2025.
Visit the IA11 homepage.
11 of 11 @ Hungry Brain
Chicago
As part of the #IA11 celebration, we have been proud to present this special event series in Chicago, focusing on a different album from our catalog on the last Monday of every month across 2025 at the Hungry Brain. Each 11 of 11 event features deep listening of an album, followed by a small group of musicians performing an interpretation of that album.
The next 11 of 11 event, Monday July 28th, will feature a full listening to Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's duo album Chicago Waves (originally released June 2020), followed by a performance by BSA Gold (keyboard, flute) with Micah Collier (bass), and Frank Morrison (drums), as the musicians respond to and reinterpret the music of the album.
Get tickets for July 28th here; and stay tuned for details and lineups for future 11 of 11 events.
