Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer US, EU & UK Shows this Fall w/ Tortoise, Stereolab, Bitchin Bajas and more
JEREMIAH CHIU & MARTA SOFIA HONER
On Tour
Following the June release of their latest album Different Rooms, and the September reissue of their 2022 debut Recordings from the Åland Islands, the duo of synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer embark on a run of shows across fall 2025.
Starting this weekend they support Bitchin Bajas in Milwaukee and Chicago. Back in California in October, they perform with Tortoise at The Broad in LA before two dates with Stereolab. In November, they head to Europe for headlining shows in Netherlands and Italy before two more dates with Tortoise in the UK.
Milwaukee WI - Falcon Bowl Hall (w/ Bitchin Bajas) - October 3rd - tickets
Chicago IL - Empty Bottle (w/ Bitchin Bajas) - October 4th - tickets
Los Angeles CA - The Broad (w/ Tortoise) - October 18th - tickets
San Francisco CA - Regency (w/ Stereolab) - October 22nd - tickets
Los Angeles CA - Bellwether (w/ Stereolab) - October 26th - tickets
Amsterdam NL - Molk Factory - November 14th
Rome IT - Studio 33 - November 15th - tickets
Milan IT - Combo - November 16th
London UK - Barbican Centre (w/ Tortoise) - November 22nd - tickets
Bristol UK - The Prospect Building (w/ Tortoise) - November 23rd - tickets
(( photo by Jennelle Fong )
…about Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer…
The LA-based duo of synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer have spent years refining a masterful interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds, both in live performance and across three albums for International Anthem: 2022’s Recordings from the Åland Islands, 2023’s The Closest Thing to Silence (in collaboration with legendary French musician Ariel Kalma), and 2025’s Different Rooms.
Drawing from their roots in Chicago's improvisational and experimental music scene, Chiu and Honer have crafted a unique sound, melding the distinctive tonal colors of viola and modular synthesizer into a cohesive and unexpected whole. It’s a singular aesthetic that can be delightfully disorienting, with arrangements being constructed and deconstructed in real time both improvisationally and via the duo’s extensive penchant for live-sampling. As Pitchfork put it: “you’re never quite sure if what you’re hearing is played ‘live’ or manipulated, and sounds keep darting over the porous border.”
The duo’s individual credits are similarly formidable. Chiu performs solo, collaboratively, and in the trance-jazz supergroup SML. His fluidity as a synthesist and improvisational arranger makes him an asset in nearly any live context—a skillset which easily translates to work in the studio. His solo album In Electric Time was recorded live at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum in LA and released on International Anthem in 2023. Chiu is also a sought-after graphic designer and visual artist with credits that include album layouts for Suzanne Ciani, Morton Subotnik, and Jeff Parker as well as print media work for Dublab, Lumpen Radio, and International Anthem. He has exhibited his visual work at The Getty Center, MOCA, and MCA Chicago, amongst others.
Honer is an active session player and live performer of all genres. She records regularly for film and television soundtracks, and can be found playing in a variety of ensembles including the Pacific Jazz Orchestra and Adrian Younge’s Linear Labs Orchestra. Her viola can be heard on recent records including Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Kendrick Lamar’s GNX. Honer is also a go-to arranger and performer within the orbit of the International Anthem label, contributing strings to albums and performances by Makaya McCraven and Daniel Villarreal.
Different Rooms
LP/CD/DD released
June 20th, 2025
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.
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.
"Different Rooms is a carefully calibrated bricolage of live spontaneity and studio craft, bridged by two artists’ shared passions for process, collaboration, and the beauty of the mundane." - Pitchfork
“...an electronic world full of enlightened grandeur.” - Tidal
“…as smooth and crystalline as a pool of soft pebbles.” - Aquarium Drunkard
“...an abstract dreamscape.”- AllMusic
“...striking and strangely hypnotic…” - KLOF MAG
“...Different Rooms is both study and symphony, mapping the right angles and curves of the city through sound.” - New Commute
A Deeper Listen on KEXP
Chiu & Honer had a very deep conversation with Isabel Khalili about process, recording, chance, change and collage for KEXP's A Deeper Listen. Highly recommended!
Different Rooms
documentary by David Burkart
In this visually stunning mini documentary by David Burkart, Chiu and Honer go deeper into the worlds of Different Rooms.
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer
Recordings from the Åland Islands
(IA11 Edition)
out NOW all digital music platforms
LP in stores September 12th
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."
In anticipation of the vinyl release on September 12th, a new IA11 Edition digital version of the album is out on all music platforms today, with the addition of three digital-only bonus tracks. "ÅRTV 682019" is material from a live performance in 2019 at Kumlinge Church of the Åland Islands, and includes excerpt of a radio interview on Åland Radio from August 6, 2019. "Crossings" is additional material from that 2019 performance at Kumlinge Church. "On the Other Sea (Live Edit from Brownswood Basement)" was recorded in 2024 at Gilles Peterson's broadcast studio in London, UK.
IA11 Liner Notes
by Sean Pecknold
Along with today's digital release, we've published Sean Pecknold's liner notes for the Åland Islands IA11 Edition on our website. An excerpt:
"We disembarked and followed a narrow country road through pine groves, red farmhouses, and open fields with more sheep than people. Kumlinge has only about 320 year-round residents, so we stood out. A few locals watched us pass; some waved, others didn’t care.
Down a dusty gravel road, we finally reached Hotel Svala. Mid-renovation, wholly charming. Once a small island hospital, its long mid-century halls and rooms still held the hum of island stories. Now, at the hands of Sage and Jannika, it was being reimagined into something new, revitalized, and ready for new people, new sounds, new dreams."
