"SNÅCKO"

Today the Los Angeles-based synth/string duo of Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer share “Snåcko,” the final lead single and video from their forthcoming debut album Recordings from the Åland Islands (LP, CD, Digital available March 11th).

The song and video were both edited from a 2019 live performance by the duo at the Church of St. Anna in Kumlinge, a small municipality in the Åland Islands of the Baltic Sea (between Finland and Sweden). “Snåcko” gives viewers a glimpse into the colorful, dreamlike palette depicted throughout the album.

Listen

The genesis of Recordings from the Åland Islands, in many ways, stems from Chiu & Honer’s experiences at St. Anna’s. Upon their first visit in 2017, Chiu was granted permission to record the church’s organ, with which he continued to experiment and perform on. The remarkable (and “unique in Finland”) 15th century frescoes adorning the walls and ceiling “painted in the Franciscan tradition” imbued the duo with sonic inspiration. Their return trip to the Åland Islands in 2019 was initiated by a grant from the Department for Åland Education and Cult Kumlinge Ungdomsforening, to perform a concert at the church. The core instrumental voices of “Snåcko” were recorded during this performance.

Preview & Pre-order Recordings from the Åland Islands

Snåcko is the name of the island next to Kumlinge, where Chiu and Honer would bike to capture field recordings, exploring the tranquil forest and listening to the surrounding sea. Their travel companions, Andrew Bruntel, Joyce Kim, and Jeff Desom, captured footage from the forest, and their live performance at St. Anna’s. Chiu & Honer edited their footage into a video for the track.

Looking back Chiu recalls "The track, for a long time, was referred to as ‘Forest’ as it captured the incredibly lush, romantic, and gentle atmosphere of the forests in Åland - a place where your eyes slowly adjust to the rainbow colored moss covering granite boulders. Walking around, you find the forest floor blossoming with blueberries, currants, and flowers, all while being surrounded by the sea. The track, like many others on the record, encourages wandering.”

Watch.

CHIU & HONER IN CONCERT

On Sunday March 13th, Chiu & Honer perform in Elysian Park, Los Angeles, as part of Floating’s series of outdoor, off grid concerts.

On Saturday March 19th they perform with Alabaster DePlume in Brooklyn, New York, as openers for International Anthem’s new quarterly residency at Public Records. (Tickets and info here.)

On April 10th, they travel to The Hague, Netherlands, for their EU performance debut of material from Recordings at the Åland Islands at Rewire Festival.

And on April 11th, they perform at Café Oto in London, UK, with Bitchin Bajas. Tickets/info here.

about Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer

The combination of modular synthesizer and viola is an uncommon one, but Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer manage to create a distinctive dyad that comes together with grace and truth. They’ve accomplished this by bringing much more than their respective axes to the table. Years of collaboration, cohabitation, shared experience, and separate but equally inspired commitments to utilitarian cultural work bind their disparate timbres together into a singular aesthetic reality.

The two artists met, appropriately, as members of a large ensemble performing Terry Riley’s “In C,” for an annual concert organized by Bitchin Bajas at Chicago modern music hub Constellation. Honer & Chiu had been living and working in Chicago for a long time, both active members of the notoriously interconnected improvisational and experimental music scenes, but they were somehow previously unintroduced. Chiu’s musical CV to that point included work with bands like Icy Demons and Chandeliers, but he was mostly known for his visual and graphic design work as Some All None. Honer had primarily worked as an instructor in Chicago, as well as a member of the ensemble Quartet Datura. In 2014, a year after their first collaboration, together, they decided to migrate to Los Angeles to continue developing their respective careers and crafts in sunnier climes.

Relocation to Los Angeles has proven to be fruitful for both artists. Honer has since become a first-call session player for the likes of Adrian Younge and Beyoncé. She’s also played on recordings by Chloe x Halle, Angel Olsen, Fleet Foxes, and Stanley Clarke, among others, including five recordings with Grammy nominations. Along with her session work, Honer is on the music faculty at California State University. Chiu has expanded his visual work in numerous capacities, in addition to becoming an active intersectional community organizer, and refocusing his musical practice to electronic music composition and sound art. He’s also become an Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art & Design; has exhibited/performed at The Getty Center, LACMA, and other distinguished locales; has become a resident programmer for Dublab; and has generated a strong unit of regular musical collaborators that includes Celia Hollander, Booker Stardrum, Ben Babbitt, Dustin Wong, Takako Minekawa, and Sam Prekop. Chiu has also designed album artwork for several International Anthem releases, including Angel Bat Dawid's Transition East, Dos Santos's City of Mirrors, Jeff Parker's Forfolks, and JP's Myspace Beats.

In 2017 Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer traveled together to the Åland Islands (an archipelago that is host to around 6,500 islands) in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. They headed to the islands with the intention of helping two friends (mother/daughter duo Jannika/Sage Reed) barn raise a small inn named Hotel Svala in Kumlinge (a municipality consisting of a small group of islands and a population of about 320). The idea was that, once completed, Svala would host artist residencies and workshop programs, creating a direct link between the islands and the USA.

The concept of recording music there came about as Honer & Chiu learned more and more about the islands. They were taken by the serene and strange quality of the place. The sun doesn’t set in the summer (and barely rises in the winter). The network of miniature islands is traversed by ferry which, according to Chiu, “casts a surreal horizontal movement through space and time, with islands shifting into and out of periphery, totally still and calm, yet always in motion.”

In 2019 they were awarded a grant from the Department of Culture to return and perform a concert at the Kumlinge Kyrka, a 14th century medieval church adorned with incredible frescos. The concert was recorded and became source material – along with improvisations on viola and electronics, pipe organ, pump organ, piano, synthesizers, field recordings and voice memos, all captured across both their trips at various locations on the archipelago – from which they meticulously crafted a post-script in the form of Recordings from the Åland Islands.

Deluxe Vinyl Package

Bread & Butter color vinyl

Recordings from the Åland Islands comes on a 160-gram vinyl LP (pressed by Smashed Plastic in Chicago) inside a heavyweight reverse board jacket, with 12-page insert booklet, IARC obi strip, and dome-patterned inner-sleeve.

And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 555 copies of *Bread & Butter* color vinyl.

Order a copy via our Bandcamp page today!

Distribution via RedEye for US, Canada, North & South America

This album will also be available on Compact Disc (in a deluxe 4-panel digipack), on Classic Black Vinyl (same specs as above), and for independent retailers only, worldwide, an indie exclusive limited edition color vinyl variant.

Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!

Distribution via !K7 for Europe, UK, Australia, and ROW

On all the same formats mentioned above, this album will be distributed by our good friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Australia, Asia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.

If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!