Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer | Ars Nova Workshop
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Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer

with Ashley Paul and Booker Stardrum

August 23, 2022

Ars Nova Workshop presents a night of deep listening with the synthesizer and viola duo of Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Hone, with opening sets by Ashley Paul and Booker Stardrum, in a program of live performances Tuesday, August 23 at Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia.

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. 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. 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. Since relocating to Los Angeles, Honer has become a first-call session player for the likes of Adrian Younge and Beyoncé and played on recordings by Chloe x Halle, Angel Olsen, Fleet Foxes, and Stanley Clarke, among others. Chiu has generated a strong unit of regular musical collaborators that includes Celia Hollander, Booker Stardrum, Ben Babbitt, Dustin Wong, Takako Minekawa, and Sam Prekop while designing album artwork for International Anthem releases, by Angel Bat Dawid, Dos Santos, and Jeff Parker.

The duo’s latest release, Recordings from the Åland Islands (2022, International Anthem), was inspired by a 2017 journey to the titular archipelago in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. Chiu and Honer were taken by the serene and strange quality of the place, where the sun doesn’t set in the summer and the network of miniature islands is traversed by ferry which, according to Chiu, “casts a surreal horizontal movement through space and time.”

Ashley Paul

Ashley Paul. Photo courtesy the artist.

Ashley Paul is an American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in London. Her intuitive process integrates free form song structures with a focused approach to sound. Using a complexity of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, prepared guitar and percussion she creates a delicate palette, uniquely her own.

Booker Stardrum

Booker Stardrum. Photo courtesy the artist.

Booker Stardrum is a composer, percussionist, producer, and educator. His compositions are sculptural, carved from the dense layering of instruments and manipulated samples, a pantonal harmonic sense, and an intuitive approach to rhythm. Stardrum has released three solo records (CRATER in 2021, Temporary etc. in 2018 and Dance And in 2015). Temporary etc. is a highly personal amalgamation of electro-acoustics, minimalism, ambient, jazz, and contemporary experimental electronic music that “further solidifies Stardrum’s position as one of America’s most intriguing composers.”(The Wire) CRATER expanded on the techniques of his previous effort with “jaw-unhinging splatterdrum masterworks that seem to explode from Stardrum’s tactile performance.” (BoomKat)


Cover: Marta Sofia Honer and Jeremiah Chiu (pictured left to right). Photo by Elizabeth Weinberg.
Tuesday, August 23
xxx8:00pm

Category

  • Performance

Program Info

$20 General Admission
21 & Over

7:00PM Doors
8:00PM Show

Featuring

Chiu / Honer Duo

  • Jeremiah Chiu – modular synthesizer, keyboard
  • Marta Sofia Honer – viola, hand chimes

Ashley Paul

  • Ashley Paul – voice, saxophone, clarinet, percussion

Booker Stardrum

  • Booker Stardrum – drums, percussion, electronics

Venue

Johnny Brenda’s
Philadelphia, PA