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Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer – Different Rooms (2025)
Review by Paul Simpson:
After releasing a collaboration with new age pioneer Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer recorded the material that ended up forming the bulk of Different Rooms. The duo's music is a mixture of live improvisation, studio experimentation, and field recordings, often created during the editing process. Different Rooms includes sounds captured from within cities as well as home environments, and it's meant to have a more direct, present feel, rather than the otherworldliness of their first album together, Recordings from the Åland Islands. The pieces generally blend Chiu's warm, alert synth pulsations and ambient textures with Honer's multi-tracked viola playing, which sometimes glides smoothly, as on the shimmering "Long and Short Delays," and other times takes more of a central, melodic role, as it does on the more complex "Speaking in Parallel." Two tracks incorporate elements of previous live collaborations recorded in 2023. "Side by Side" is built around Jeff Parker's ascending guitar figures, while Josh Johnson's gentle saxophone notes are woven throughout "Different Rooms," one of a few selections featuring nearly subliminal vocalizations by Giovanna Jacques. "One of Eight" submerges chanting and bells recorded at a Taiwanese temple under trickling, pulsing synths. Two tracks near the end are meant as reflections of pieces from earlier in the album, with "Side by Side (reflected)" electronically re-creating Parker's ascending guitar sequences, and "Mean Solar Time (reflected)" resembling a more lullaby-like variation on the opening composition. Different Rooms is a nebulous haze of semi-familiar melodies and half-heard voices, forming an abstract dreamscape. — AMG
Track List:
01 - Mean Solar Time
02 - Long and Short Delays
03 - Side by Side (feat. Jeff Parker)
04 - One of Eight
05 - Before and After Signs
06 - Different Rooms (feat. Josh Johnson)
07 - Speaking in Parallel
08 - Side by Side (reflected)
09 - Mind by a Way
10 - Mean Solar Time (reflected)
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, jazz
Origin: Los Angeles, California, USA 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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