Jeremiah Chiu

About this event

Jeremiah Chiu is a synthesist in the broadest sense of the word—a craftsperson of the modular

synth and other musical instruments and tools, as well as an artist, designer, and educator

whose work continually brings disparate forms of knowledge into new relationships. While

widely recognized for his versatile electronic music as a solo artist, textured recordings in a

duo with violist Marta Sofia Honer, and the experimental quintet he co-leads, SML, Chiu has

simultaneously maintained a practice as a graphic designer and visual artist, developing a

practice attentive to both the structure of technological systems and the contingencies of

liveness and emergence.

For Chiu, visual thinking and musical thinking are not separate disciplines but different

expressions of the same innate compositional sensibility. This point of view is born equally

from his idiosyncratic sense of aesthetics and his capacity for a warm and porous exchange

within a thriving community of creative collaborators that stretches between Chicago and Los

Angeles.

Rooted in Chicago's deeply interconnected experimental music community, his music has

consistently developed through long-term collaborations and shared artistic inquiry. Following

years of performing with groups including Icy Demons and Chandeliers and within the Shape

Shoppe collective, Chiu emerged as a distinctive voice on the International Anthem label

through a series of acclaimed recordings that include Recordings from the Åland Islands

(2022) with Honer, his solo album In Electric Time (2023), The Closest Thing to Silence (2024)

with Honer and the late Ariel Kalma, and his ongoing work with the exploratory ensemble

SML—a group formed out of this thriving sense of kinship and its emergent possibilities,

pointedly explored in the live moment. Alongside collaborators including Jeff Parker, Sam

Prekop, Makaya McCraven, Josh Johnson, Marquis Hill, Booker Stardrum, Celia Hollander,

Takako Minekawa, and many others, Chiu is one of the key bondbuilders within both Chicago

and Los Angeles for a musical moment with momentum—one grounded less in genre than in

attentive listening, improvisation, and a shared commitment to expanding the possibilities of

composition. This interdependent community made him a natural fit for national tours with

Mary Lattimore and M83.

His musical output resonates beyond traditional venues and specifically in cultural institutions

looking to animate their architecture and contexts with transformative sound. This affinity

has led to unique happenings at LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight, The Getty Center, LACMA,

Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, The Chicago Cultural Center, and the Museum of

Contemporary Art, Chicago, amongst others. A commission for the Getty Museum’s project

PIANO-GRAPHS (2018) transformed words and graphic forms into a composition for the player

piano, collapsing typography, image, mechanical technology, and sound into a work that

treated the piano roll much like a photograph: a surface upon which time itself could be

inscribed. This project anticipated Chiu's later experiments at Los Angeles's Vintage

Synthesizer Museum, where he sequenced the museum's vast collection of synthesizers

without the use of MIDI and recorded the resulting improvisations to analog tape.

Across his work runs a sustained attentiveness to the unfolding natural world. Whether

incorporating field recordings into albums, or through open-air live performance, or through

his regular participation in LA's Living Earth series held in public parks, Chiu composes with

environments as much as within them. Electronic systems become receptive to the

contingencies of wind, birdsong, shifting acoustics, and time itself.

This attention to the human experience with various landscapes echoes throughout his

approach to graphic design. As founder and creative director of the Los Angeles studio Some

All None, Chiu has developed projects for clients including Google, Sonos, dublab, the Venice

Architecture Biennale, ICA LA, and the Renaissance Society, while teaching at Otis College of

Art and Design, where he received the Teaching Excellence Award. Alongside this work, his

visual practice has included exhibitions, publications, installations, and commissions that

continually explore the multi-dimensional relationship between language, image, systems,

sound, and perception.

His compositions possess an unusually spatial quality. Rather than simply organizing melody or

rhythm, they organize attention—guiding the listener through shifting fields of texture,

proximity, repetition, and depth. Listening becomes less an experience of following a linear

narrative than inhabiting an environment whose forms continually reorganize themselves.

That same attentiveness extends throughout Chiu's broader practice, where sound, image,

typography, design, teaching, and kinship become different manifestations of a singular way

of thinking.

Accessibility Disclaimer: Barboza is not wheelchair accessible.

Important Information:

* This event is 21 & over. Valid ID is required. Minors will not be permitted entry.

* Doors open at the listed event time.

* Event start time is generally one hour after doors open but is subject to change without notice.

* All tickets are nonrefundable with the exception of event cancellation.

* Support acts are subject to change.

* Orders in violation of the published ticket limit are subject to cancellation without notice.

From Barboza