The award for the most no-nonsense album title of 2022 surely went to Recordings From The Åland Islands. Why complicate things when Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer recorded their debut across various sites on the Finnish archipelago of Åland? That album perfectly encapsulated the then-prevalent anything-goes spirit of contemporary ambient: instrumental music for meditation, laced with field recordings, folkloric echoes and neoclassical inflections.
Now, after various side projects, the duo returns with Different Rooms – an album less about evoking one specific place and more about stitching together music made across many. Using live recordings from their 2023 European tour as raw material, Chiu and Honer manipulate, edit and expand them into a coherent sonic narrative. Rather than mapping sound onto geography, the new album explores abstraction and melody as twin poles of emotional resonance.
The result is impressionistic once again, but carries a brighter tone than its predecessor. Guest appearances from labelmates Jeff Parker (guitar) and Josh Johnson (saxophone) slide seamlessly into the album’s flow – so much so that one could assume they had always been part of the plan. Different Rooms offers less a sense of fixed location than a sustained atmosphere: liminal, shimmering, quietly expansive.
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