Recordings From The Aland Islands (IA11 Edition)

Recordings from the Åland Islands, the 2022 duo debut by synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer, is a truly unique series of pieces that marry acoustic and electronic sounds with field recordings, all captured on a trip to the titular Baltic archipelago. Its release signaled another turning point for International Anthem, presenting a fresh take on the collage-based music that had become such a signature facet of the label's catalog while also establishing a close relationship with two artists who have since become pillars of the label's community.

That relationship started with mutual friends and years spent on the Chicago music scene, but fully blossomed after Chiu and Honer had already relocated to Los Angeles, where they would become critical builders of IARC's bridge between the two cities. By the time Åland Islands was coming to fruition, Honer had already written, performed and recorded strings with Makaya McCraven and Daniel Villarreal, but this project brought her to the front as a lead artist in her own right. Åland Islands was the label's first collaboration of any kind with Chiu, who has since released the solo outing In Electric Time and the genre-breaking debut of his co-led supergroup SML, in addition to a trio album with Honer and the late Ariel Kalma (2024’s The Closest Thing to Silence), and copious album art and sundry visual work for IARC from his graphic design chair (including the now-annual publication Tracing the Lines). And that’s not even mentioning Chiu & Honer’s sophomore duo album Different Rooms, which was released in June 2025 to wide critical acclaim.

Recordings from the Åland Islands is far more than its context within the world of IARC, however, and it’s certainly more than its context as a travel document. Here Chiu and Honer have created a new world out of an old one with work that sees them in dialogue with their own source material. Like early masterpieces by Franco Battiato or Alvin Lucier, the album repeatedly presents the listener with a palpable sense of place, only to pluck them up and drop them into an entirely new one.

Filmmaker Sean Pecknold, who accompanied Chiu and Honer on their first trip to the Åland Islands, sums things up beautifully in his liner notes for the IA11 Edition of the album: "Along with their music, they recorded field sounds of the island: the murmurings of our friends, the birds at dusk, an organ inside an ancient church, the hum of bike tires rolling across soft gravel, the Finnish PA announcement on the afternoon ferry. Every sound they threaded into their compositions became a countermelody to the fluttery layers of synthesizer and haunting strings. They were starting to define a new texture, a new tone, a new vision."

The IA11 Edition LP features our IARC 2025 obi strip, plus a new 16-page 11x11" insert booklet with unpublished photos from the recordings, new liner notes by Sean Pecknold, and an in-depth conversation between Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.

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