Jeremiah Chiu

“I’m drawn to pieces that have a human quality to them,” the synthesizer explorer Jeremiah Chiu once said. “They’re not perfectly synced. You can feel the motion in the music.” For nearly four decades, Chiu has been slowly pursuing that goal, from his collaborations with his bands like SML and Jeff Parker Expansion Trio and his partner, the violist Marta Sofia Honer, to his own spellbinding solo records. Chiu grew up playing piano and violin in the suburbs of Chicago, but he began to transfer those skills to electronics at an early age, using a Casio keyboard to multi-track as his parents prepared dinner. He played in punk bands as a teen while simultaneously learning how to beat-match and run synthesizers from some neighborhood friends. His musical world began to expand at DePaul University, when he learned of local heroes like Tortoise and The Sea and Cake and how many styles their music swallowed.

Chiu and Honer decamped to Los Angeles in 2014, in part seeking a scene where the music they made and the graphic design he did could interact more, where those worlds didn’t feel so separate. They found it: In the last half-decade, they have released two wondrous duo records, including 2025’s Different Rooms, and cut a record with New Age legend Ariel Kalma before his death. And, of course, there’s SML, Chiu’s teaching job and design work, and several other projects. But his solo work is mesmerizing and intriguing. For 2018’s Song Send Poem, he routed 19 exquisite instrumentals into software that turned the sounds into words; for the 2020 single “Time You Can Change,” he cut the singing of Takako Minekawa into bits, spreading it like vapor through his synths. In October 2026, Chiu will release Edge Conditions, a scintillating mix of rubbery funk and radiant electro, barely controlled chaos and convulsive rhythmic work; it feels like an arrival. Chiu’s music toys with ideas of motion and stillness, of rest and energy, the hum of his circuits like blankets for cartwheels of sound. Aside from his duties in SML, he brings an army of synthesizers and a new ensemble to Big Ears 2027.