Self-Portrait: Jeremiah Chiu

Artwork by Mickey Miles

For our Self-Portrait series, we invite our favorite musicians to create an audio depiction of themselves through songs from the past and present.

Experimental synthesist Jeremiah Chiu is in the throes of a prolific period of expression and innovation marked by three records in three years that masterfully exercise the disciplines of field recording, analog patchwork, mechanized improvisation, and fourth-world electronic composition. Chiu shares the wiring diagram for his 2023 album In Electric Time; a junction of experimental electronics, hypnotic tape manipulation, and austere digital collages.

“The selections in this playlist represent a variety of reference points, sonic spirit guides, and approaches to how I edited and produced “In Electric Time.” For example, in naming my track "A Cloud Song", I imagined it to be a nice poetic pairing with Ryuichi Sakamoto's "A Rain Song". Seeing those titles next to each other now, you might think, "ah, I see the connection", but as they live out there in the world in their own spheres, I enjoyed the idea that they may one day stumble into each other, or run in parallel, never meeting. The same, of course, goes for tracks titled "Rhythm..."— a direct reference to Raymond Scott's collection of studio experiments as heard on "Manhattan Research..." and "Three Willow Park". The playlist also loosely follows the same narrative cadence as "In Electric Time" and is really just a collection of some of my favorite experimental electronic references that skirt between lab experiment and autre pop. Analog, tape, electronic humanness.”