From the outside to the inside, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer flip from making idyllic, mystical music to compositions that feel notably more internal. “We want this music to meet you where you are,” the duo say of their new album, Different Rooms. Where 2022’s magnificent Recordings From the Åland Islands felt like the memory of a perfect holiday living in your head, Different Rooms feels like opening the door upon returning home; Åland Islands was full of bleary orange sunshine and lapping waves, but their follow-up exudes more monochrome shades. Concrete greys and the distant thrum of a city seem to exude from the album, like the natural music of the outside world seeping into your own living room.
A different colour palette doesn’t make for music that is any less fascinating though. Different Rooms is cosier, that bit more scattered, but still another shining example of how the duo are marvelously in tune with each other. Chiu and Honer’s contributions merge without notice, forming suently across tracks. And this is both in live settings and in the studio, of which both environments are equally conducive to the creation of their music: ideas for the album developed during live performances on the duo’s autumn 2024 EU tour before they took them to their home studios to form them into their final shapes in early 2025. Where those initial ideas and the studio manipulation converge exactly is mostly impossible to tell, but an important part of what makes Chiu and Honer’s music so interesting.
It’s these moments of seamlessness that are the album’s most captivating, and they turn up in the album’s two lengthy centerpieces, “Before and After Signs” and “Different Rooms”. Across eight and seven minutes respectively, the duo give themselves plenty of room to stretch out without ever feeling like they are bleeding the stone needlessly. Guest vocalist Giovanna Jacques dots wordless syllables like a mantra on “Different Rooms” as Josh Johnson’s saxophone plays alongside; Chiu and Honer knit these sounds into the pattern of the music, making for a disorientating tone as ascending synth melodies swim about. On “Before and After Signs” an eerie haziness emerges as a bass bobs about like a buoy out at sea. The track is an exercise in morphing tones that slowly push the track along. Like the duo’s best work, time doesn’t seem to exist while it’s playing and you simply find yourself transported from one point to the next when it ends.
In shorter forms, Chiu and Honer still create little worlds that are pleasant to inhabit: “Long and Short Delays” is a muzzy mix of synths that feels like either coming out of a deep sleep or going into one; “One of Eight” barely scrapes two minutes, but the field recordings of a Taiwanese Zhinan Temple alongside the chimes and soft bells make for what feels like a postcard of a trip; the prelude-like “Side By Side” incorporates Jeff Parker’s inquisitive guitar notes as Honer’s strings add a filmic melancholy to the edges. At the end of the record there are a couple of tracks in their “reflected” form, which offer an opportunity to approach their compositions from a different angle. “Side by Side (reflected)” has a lazier countenance to it, while “Mean Solar Time (reflected)” takes the warm soothing gauze of the opening track and stretches out the original melody to become an Angelo Badalamenti-like languorous, more blissful ambience.
Chiu and Honer work to a high standard, and that’s evidenced by the breadth of work they do outside of working with each other. Honer contributed viola to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, and also did strings and arrangements for recordings and performances by International Anthem artists Makaya McCraven and Daniel Villarrea. Chiu has his own delightful solo synth endeavours as well as co-leading the LA trance-jazz supergroup SML. Both were requested specifically by the late French pioneer Ariel Kalma for collaborative work, which resulted in a fluid and dynamic album last year. Different Rooms is more evidence of the duo’s quality, and its main downside is that it doesn’t reach the magical highs of their debut album. Still, in different places, different results will be yielded; Different Rooms may have familiar qualities, but it makes for a different excursion.
