Jeremiah Chiu on Swapping Synths, Chicago, and Going with the Flow

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Here's what is going down today: Jeremiah Chiu is having quite a year, from his role in SML's sensational live document Spontaneous Music Live to his brand-new solo record Edge Conditions, which has been out physically for a minute now and hits DSPs (that's "digital streaming platforms" for all the non-industry-wonks reading this) on October 27. I've been familiar with Jeremiah's work for more than a minute now and I can confidently say Edge Conditions is a surprising left turn, with tons of rippling drum machine textures and aggressive synth patterns that introduce striking new elements to his overall musical practice. I hopped on a call with Jeremiah a few weeks ago and he was very gracious about letting me into his creative world, check it out:

Obviously, the sounds on this record are something new when it comes to your solo catalog. Let's talk about how it came together.
I've traversed so much in the past several years, across many different records. But this record was, in some ways, going back to my roots. There's much more drum machine and percussion, and the form of the record is a bit more song-oriented. I haven't been working in that way for the past several years, just by nature of where I've been and what I've been up to. It collects what I've been up to in the past few years, combined with my desire to swing the pendulum a little bit from what I might be doing with SML or in duo with someone like Marta Sofia Honer.

As far as releasing something under your own name, was there a specific point in which you made the call that this would be a solo record under your own name, even though you did work with a few collaborators on it?
It definitely started with the idea of being a solo record in the sense that I'd been talking with [International Anthem co-founder] Scottie McNiese about a solo record for many years. In Electric Time was a solo record, but with a very specific approach, which was improvising and collaging. This one was written from the ground up. In terms of collaborating with people, what's nice is we have this community of musicians and artists that are working with each other in many different ways, and it felt super natural. There wasn't a huge amount of collaboration, and I wanted to forge a record that I knew was going to be solo.

I had an idea in the beginning for it to be a bit more ensemble-oriented, and I was going to write towards that in a much more specific way. What ended up happening is, I found a lost session that didn't go anywhere with Takako Minekawa and Booker Stardrum on it. But the session file was a completely different piece of music, and I noticed that there were these takes that Booker and Takako had done many years ago that were just muted. So I unmuted them and muted everything else on this file, and I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is incredible." When I heard that, it shifted my entire premise of this solo record to this energy that's really capturing my attention right now and I want to pursue fully. That [session] ended up being "Plastic Mind/Elastic Machines," which feels much more rhythmic, percussive, and grounded in a noisy tribalism.

After I unmuted those two hidden moments and wrote completely over them, I was like, "Oh my gosh, here's the beacon." So I shifted out of the idea of trying to force another idea to come to fruition and gave myself these parameters instead, looking for the nuggets. I said [to myself], "Don't fight it. Lean into it." All of this music came together in two months amongst a SML tour, some duo shows and some shows with Jeff Parker. I was trying to capture all of the different ideas that I wanted to express, based on what I'm loving about the way our communities are existing right now. There's all these different touch points from things that feel a little bit more ambient, more noisy, more groove-oriented, and everything in between. I also wanted to just have fun, you know?

You mentioned the notion of almost stumbling upon this record's approach while taking a look at old files, which I find interesting. Talk to me about embracing spontaneity as an artist. It sounds like a paradox, but being spontaneous almost takes practice in doing so. No one just wakes up one day and suddenly tilts towards improvisation.
You definitely hit it. It is a creative practice, and a creative muscle—one that you take dedicated time to continually invest in pushing your boundaries. I was talking to Ben Babbitt about how, when you're making these new things, the hardest part is trying to see beyond your vision. That's a very uncomfortable place, because it requires you to go into the unknown. For me, learning how to improvise with the modular synth in a more analog context with a bunch of trained jazz musicians is an uncomfortable place, because I'm bringing a tool to a space that I don't have a roadmap for, and I haven't seen a ton of people do the same way.

But what I've learned in my own practice is to really lean into the moments that are really uncomfortable, because, in that space, you recognize that something is going to be learned and you're going to allow yourself a little bit of freedom to embrace a new idea. I say this when I'm teaching graphic design to students: Separating the process of making from the process of judging is an important idea, but it's really hard to do because we self-judge as we go. That results in not letting an idea see its fullest potential, which is what I really want to set up an opportunity for. I spend a lot of time not really knowing where it's going to go, but I can trust a little bit of my intuitive self that I built over many decades that it will lead somewhere. With design specifically, I always talk about this idea that the designing part is the very end. You can always refine the thing and make decisions about how it will appear or sound, but finding the real soul and heart of the thing is not something that you can always just imagine from the get-go. The format shouldn't be decided before you see what the potential is.

What happens when you find yourself dealing with a creative roadblock? Doug from Tortoise told me last year that when they're really grinding on one particular song, sometimes he'll just fall asleep in the studio.
I definitely experienced [creative roadblocks] while making this record, because it was on a condensed timeline in which I knew that, at the the end, we either have a record or we don't—and it's okay if we don't, and it's great if we do. But what that forced was a couple of very intentional weeks of conjuring ideas. I was like, "For the next 10 days, every day a completely new idea. Don't go back to anything."

At that same time, I remember seeing a little clip from Arca doing a School of Song workshop and talking about their process of coming to the studio every day, saying that some days you just feel not inspired or ready to work, but to go and continue to do that flexes that muscle in a way that forces function. I remember seeing that at the exact same moment that I was like, "I too am not interested right now in being creative on this particular day." But I was sitting there, pounding my head against the wall, and being like, "I told myself I would do this, I'm gonna push through this threshold." And you have that breakthrough moment where you leave that day being like, "Well, at least I stuck to my premise and I worked. I'm not happy with the work." Then, you come back the next day and you have perspective on it. You're like, "Oh my gosh, here's the nugget, let's move forward."

Yeah, it's not a 1:1, but with running my own publication, almost every day I'll wake up and be like, "I really don't want to write today." And then I'm like, "Well, now that I've thought that, I'm going to sit down and do it and we'll see what happens." Usually, by the end, I know that it was worth it.
Exactly. You do that enough times, you find those moments where you're like, "You know what? I'm okay at this."

Let's talk about your graphic design work, and what you bring that's different—and similar—to these respective creative disciplines.
With design, I'm usually in a space in which I'm working on someone else's project, so you're in the role of support to try to materialize someone else's ideas into a visual system. I'm always trying to get to the core of, "This is what you've asked for, but this is actually what you're trying to say." Those, oftentimes, are two different things, because so much of our understanding of what a designer might do is based on what's out there already, versus completely new ways to understand visual culture. A good example is, if a business feels like it's flailing, they're like, "We need a rebrand, we need a new logo." And my question is, what does that mean? What does that static object do for your business goals? Does it actually change anything? Or are you trying to actually solve a completely different problem, like changing the way you do business or reaching a different audience? That's a completely different brief or approach.

Design, music, and visual art—they all share the same vocabulary. You're working in composition, you're thinking about dynamics, rhythm, tension, contrast, and play. You can read them with the same set of terms. That, to me, is really interesting, because it allows the flexibility of traversing different mediums using the same set of tools. For music, going back to the 10 days, it's asking myself a design question. If I need content for a record, how might I generate it to then look at that content? I take a moment to synthesize it and find the core ideas of what I'm trying to really express.

You talked about before about drawing from this community of people who are always working with each other. You have roots in Chicago, which has a massive history of left-field and experimental music, and you also bridge the gap with regards to what's been going on in Los Angeles in the last five or six years. Talk to the growing group of collaborators across these two cities.
Obviously, it's much easier to connect internationally now than it's ever been, in the sense that, you're able to see more of a mono field of artists working in a variety of ways, but they exist in the spaces less than they do the cities. There's also different traditions, audiences, and approaches in each city that impact the work that comes out of them. I recognize myself as somebody that still very much embodies my Chicago nature, in the sense that Chicago is an amazing music and art city. It's the same with Los Angeles—they have very different topographies and cultures, but there's an overlapping sensibility with really special pockets of ideas always burgeoning out of them.

When I was in Chicago, I was so inspired by how much free jazz was happening, but it was leaning around a couple of venues—like back in the day when Jeff Parker and John Herndon were doing their night at Rodan, Danny's having a more electronic night, Constellation, Hungry Brain, the Whistler, the Umbrella Music series. These were spaces in which you could see it happening every day of the week. You know, In L.A., I wasn't finding that same amount of activity when I first moved here, and maybe it's because of the spread of the landscape. It's such a larger city to traverse to be able to find those things, and maybe it was just because I was new to the city and just didn't know where to look.

But over time, I've found that they exist in a different way. There was obviously Low End Theory for a long time, and the beat scene pocket of Stones Throw—and now Leaving Records is having a big impact on the type of stuff that people are working on. There's garage rock and psych rock too, and all that stuff's happening here in a very different way than it was happening in Chicago. Those things impact my approach in the sense that you want to find your people in each city that want to go deep into some niche topic about music or art—and both cities have tons of those.

Let's talk about creative conflict in collaboration. It's unavoidable, no matter how open you are. How do you manage it?
Fruitful collaboration requires a couple of necessary things, and one of them is trust—and trust takes time to build. Communication and openness change the dynamic and set the foundation for true collaboration. You're often in a situation in which you do find out that somebody desires less collaboration—and that's totally okay. But if you want a truthful collab, you have to be open to it not always going your way, but not because what you've proposed is a bad idea. It's just that there's a common space that's maybe different than your initial vision. Being open to change is a constant push-and-pull, because you also want people to come in with a strong point of view and have like some desire to be like, "This is what I stand for and what I want to bring to the table."

With Booker and Marta, we've traversed a couple different realms of collaboration. There were definitely moments of tension where we're learning how we each prefer to work, and it's not going to always be the same way. I'm somebody that likes a little bit of focus time in isolation. Maybe Booker prefers batting around ideas. We could do both of those—we just have to find the time to do one or the other, and then come together. We were joking about how we definitely had tense practices and moments where you're like, "I'm pissed right now—but, I'm not pissed at you, I'm equally pissed at myself for not being able to articulate and communicate in an effective way." Because it's 100% not a personal attack. We're sitting there trying to be like, "Where's our common ground and how do we communicate this?"

Even though you oftentimes come to these things where you're creating and you're trying to communicate the unknown, that's a premise that's ripe for miscommunication and misunderstanding, because we're forging something from nothing. We don't know what it is, but we know what it's not. Being really understanding and open to that scenario helps a ton, because then you're like, "Alright, we just need a beat to take a moment and then come back and try to articulate your ideas."

This new record has a very specific sound to me in terms of electronic music. Let's talk about your relationship to electronic music in general.
I had the great fortune of being in Chicago in the late '90s, when house was burgeoning and you'd have access to a lot of this stuff. I was playing in punk and emo bands, but there was also this simultaneous fascination with our group of friends in vintage synthesizers, house music, and how all that stuff was made. I had the ability to work with some now-legendary pieces of gear, which I still have a ton of because it was a time in which nobody wanted this stuff. It's so much harder now to get into that stuff, because you can't try all the gear out the way that you used to. At that time, everything was between $100 and $400, and you could essentially try and trade them all. In that decade and a half, I tried every vintage synth I could get my hands on, and you keep the ones that really resonate with you. The same thing happened with modular Eurorack synthesizers. There was that website, ModWiggler, where you could basically just rent modules because everyone would sell them back for 80% of the cost.

My listening habits really opened up from being really into Chicago house, and then getting into Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, and then like getting really into electric Miles and all the work that Patrick Gleeson was doing in that space—which opened up this door to all of the synth pioneers. One of my long-standing go-to inspirations is Raymond Scott and compilations like Manhattan Research Inc. and Three Willow Park. There's so much there that, if I heard it out of context today, it'd still sound contemporary—but they were done so long ago with handmade synthesizers, and there's a quality to all of it that resonated because it felt very alive. It felt like a human was manipulating these things and trying to figure out how to make music with electricity.

I'm fascinated by Piero Umiliani and all the early '70s Italian minimalist composers. All of that stuff really was super inspiring growing up. Tortoise and that group of people—Jim O'Rourke, the Sea and Cake, Isotope 217—introduced all of us young musicians in Chicago to a huge amount of reference points. Living in the city proper and going to shows, I became a voracious listener where I was like, "I want to hear everything that these people think is cool, because I think it's cool."