Los Angeles-based composer, synthesist, graphic designer and multi-medium artist Jeremiah Chiu announces a new album, In Electric Time, to be released by International Anthem on September 29th, 2023. The title track “In Electric Time” is available now on all digital music platforms, along with a video directed and edited by Burkie.
Chiu’s announcement comes in the wake of a long run of solo shows opening for M83 on their Fantasy tour, and in anticipation of an October tour where he will support Mary Lattimore across the US.
On June 29th, 2023, Jeremiah Chiu walked into the Vintage Synthesizer Museum (VSM) in Highland Park, Los Angeles, with no plan more specific than “let’s fire this stuff up and see what happens.” Exploring the VSM’s vast collection of classic, rare and staple synthesizers, he would sequence, trigger, and layer the machines together with help from VSM founder/curator Lance Hill.
Hill recalls:
Jeremiah arrived before the engineer showed up. We talked for maybe 5 minutes before he started programming a sound and sequence into the Gleeman Pentaphonic. By the time the engineer showed up, Jeremiah had built several other parts around the Gleeman that weren’t synced by any control method but sounded like they were just calling and responding to each other. They plugged the Tascam 388 into the patch bay, and hit record. Jeremiah played with it, and that was it. First piece written and recorded in under an hour. It felt natural, fun and free. And that’s pretty much how the rest of the session went. Constant ecstatic motion. It was the funnest non-HipHop session I’ve ever worked on.
The resulting album – In Electric Time – was recorded in two days, and edited to completion in the two days following. It was captured fully analog by engineer Ben Lumsdaine, who contributes performances on a few tracks himself. Cooper Crain (of Bitchin Bajas) makes an appearance as well, but ultimately the collection is an intuitive expression of organic electronic music conceptualized and created in-context by Chiu alone, as he calls on a lifetime of work in sound synthesis to paint a fulgent, refreshingly undercut sequence of cinematic sketches and in-process themes. In some ways, In Electric Time reflects the directness of Raymond Scott’s electronic studio recordings — with sharp cuts and room chatter — and, in others, it conjures the in-the-moment magic of Harmonia.
About the work, Chiu says:
The approach to the improvisations was to embrace the mixer setups at VSM — where a section of synthesizers are all routed to a single mixer/patchbay — and to start at one end of the studio and work our way around the six different sections. I began with the synths I was most familiar with — or had spent years researching — and was fairly certain I could reign in quickly. When working with vintage gear, there’s always a sweet spot where the instrument sings in a unique way. This may be the idiosyncrasies of its filter and how it resonates, the action of the keys, the ability to trigger and use control voltage to sequence, or the unique onboard features. I love finding the moments where a melody or rhythm appears in an unexpected way — at times feeling more like archaeology than sculpture. I was quite improvisatory with the editing as well, often pulling bits from distinctly different sections in dialogue with each other, in order to maintain the raw, spontaneous feeling. I loved hearing moments in the recordings when Ben started or stopped tape, so a take that was running long and beyond its moment would hit directly against a fresh idea.
The album’s title track / lead single is the final piece of music that Chiu created during his two-day session at the VSM. “In Electric Time” sounds like the end-credits score for a dystopian late-80s sci-fi thriller, with lush Sakamoto-esque CS80 chords hovering above a frenetic, off-meter vocoder loop (made by Chiu using the EMS Vocoder 2000 with a TR-606 as the carrier signal that simultaneously triggers a JX-3P sequence). The tension builds steadily and powerfully through the final movement of the track… leaving us hanging in suspense, until the engineer Lumsdaine is heard saying: “That’s the end of the tape.” The single comes via a video directed and edited by Burkie, who overlays classic early computerized graphics and analog video synth by Chiu on top of footage shot at the VSM sessions.