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.
