No matter what has come before, each generation must discover, redefine, and eventually claim a genre for itself. It’s an evolutionary rite of passage. For spaces as hard to pin down as jazz and avant-garde music, the context of time becomes even more illusory. Across eras, artists like John Cage, Sun Ra, and Can have found their way into the cracks between notes and silence, form and spontaneity, harmony and dissonance.
In today’s climate, few acts carry the flag for the unconventional better than SML. Made up of bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Booker Stardrum, guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, and synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, the collective has amassed a devoted listener base with albums of live improvisation. Its sound is sprawling, demanding, and playful—often all at once.
SML sits firmly at the center of the Los Angeles experimental community, buttressed by the International Anthem and Leaving Records imprints and venues like the beloved, now-defunct ETA. Over the last decade, Chiu’s unmistakable synth thumbprint has remained a core element of this fertile creative hotbed.
A Sampling of Influences
Originally from Chicago and now based in LA, Chiu brings fine art sensibilities and a wide-ranging musicality to SML. As the group’s synth player and live sampler, he fuses a lifetime of disparate influences into the sonic melange. It’s always been this way for him.
“I love Daft Punk and Smoking Popes,” Chiu says, rattling off a few favorites. “I was in downtown Chicago, going to tons of shows, seeing Tortoise and The Sea and Cake, but also being obsessed with the electric Miles phase.”
Perched amidst a collection of delectable vintage synths (with a healthy helping of Roland in the mix), Chiu is talkative, with a soft, dry sense of humor. Modest and quick to praise others, he is clear and precise when describing his methods and passions. This lucidity goes all the way back to his earliest musical memories.
“I grew up playing piano and violin in the suburbs of Chicago,” Chiu remembers. “It was just classical music. My younger sister had a little Casio WK-1200 in the living room. That keyboard made a large impact on my life. It had a six-track recorder, and basically taught me how to do multitrack recording.”
He was hooked. The instrument’s spell led to a lifelong love affair with synth music. “Suzanne Ciani and Piero Umiliani, Laurie Spiegel, all the early synthesis stuff like Jean-Jacques Perrey, the Switched-On stuff.” These esoteric names went into the blender of Chiu’s burgeoning imagination. Which brings us to the present day.
Music on the Edge
That fundamental reverence for synth history remains evident on his latest solo release, Edge Conditions, a near-uncategorizable collection that contains everything from trance jazz to challenging modular textures. For the veteran player, it’s a new aesthetic foray, one that differs from SML and his collaborations with Marta Sofia Honer.
“The stuff I do with Marta is kind of like contemporary classical where you’re looking at electro-acoustic music,” says Chiu. “With solo stuff, it feels more natural to tap into all these wells and bring them together into their own specific cocktail.” Arriving at this aesthetic happened as a response to past approaches.
“This particular record, I was spending a lot more time thinking, ‘How can I swing the pendulum in the other direction and compose some pieces from the ground up based on whatever interest or noodlings I have in the studio?'”
"With solo stuff, it feels more natural to tap into all these wells and bring them together into their own specific cocktail."
The initial sessions for Edge Conditions were solitary. “It was more or less composed by myself in my studio, and then we did remote sessions with Marta and Ben Lumsdaine, who plays percussion and drums. So, it came a bit more from an isolated headspace.”
Chiu manipulated these elements into idiosyncratic new forms. “On the second track, ‘A.M. Fuses,’ Ben gave me two or three drum takes, and I started to hear all these other ideas. So I formed a couple of other tunes using chopped-up loops.”
The repurposing yielded dividends. “Chops from his drum takes I would push through my vocoders, use them as triggers, use them as envelope followers.” Chiu’s cut-up method was both unorthodox and effective. “I built new songs from the same set of drum takes.”
Natural Occurrences
This ability to let music find its own shape is a core principle of the Chiu’s ethos; packaging it is another matter. “As an artist or creator, it’s easy to forge ideas,” he muses. “Editing those ideas down and making decisions and stopping? That process is very hard.”
Chiu strives to keep things fresh, even when it’s uncomfortable. “I want to get into the process of being a conscious editor,” he says, “where I’m able to capture things, then get them out with enough time that they speak to the moment they were conceptualized, versus lingering too long and having a different resonance.”
It’s a game of refinement without overdoing it, but Chiu believes he’s getting better. “I try not to be overly precious these days about perfecting every bit of everything, because it feels more tangible and real,” he explains. “I leave all the first take moments in there, the natural occurrences I think are interesting to hear.”
"I leave all the first take moments in there, the natural occurrences I think are interesting to hear."
Small Medium Large Impact
With his philosophical bent, it’s interesting to hear Chiu’s take on the SML origin story. “There was this small club called ETA in Highland Park in Los Angeles that closed in 2023,” he begins. “When I moved to LA, I was looking for spaces that have improvised or experimental music.”
There, a Chicago connection came into play. “I came upon Jeff Parker doing a regular Monday night series there. Jeff is the guitarist in Tortoise and one of my favorite groups ever, Isotope 217,” Chiu says. “When I started to go to that night, it was very minimal.”
Things began to expand, and soon a scene was in full bloom, establishing Los Angeles as a new cardinal force in fringe music. “It grew from five people in that room to a packed house over the course of seven or so years,” he says of that idyllic boom period. “Ryan Julio, the programmer, invited musicians in LA to have nights where they could experiment.”
The ensuing events are soaked in lore. “Gregory Uhlmann, the guitarist, had two nights at ETA, and he invited me to participate,” Chiu recalls. “The first night was just a trio, and then the second night it was a quartet with Anna, Booker, Greg, and me.”
Like all good music scenes, it needed someone to document the proceedings. That role came in the form of Bryce Gonzales. “He’s basically a genius engineer archiving all the happenings there onto his custom Highland Dynamics mixer, because he makes those compressors and preamps.”
Chiu believes there was alchemy at play. “You’re getting somebody that’s making these incredible live recordings in a space where there’s basically musicians with musicians hanging out.”
The results of the get-togethers were too good to ignore. “We heard those recordings, and we were like, ‘We’ve got to record two more of these with everybody.’ So we booked two more nights,” Chiu says. “We took that set of four nights of recordings and edited them down into the first record.”
And a new band was born.
From there, Scottie McNiece of the prestigious International Anthem Recording Company helped put the music into the world. It’s a tight-knit relationship that continues to this day; the label is the hub for Chiu’s work. “They are incredibly supportive, and they’ve taught me a lot,” he enthuses about the imprint, home to so many luminaries. “I revolve in the orbit of their universe.”
"It grew from five people in that room to a packed house over the course of seven or so years."
Synthropic Therapy
Chiu’s studio is a living, breathing organism, packed with lovingly maintained vintage keyboards and a complex web of modular pieces, many housed in gorgeous bespoked cases. A vintage TR-808 pokes its head out among other treasures. The proud owner is happy to give a tour.
“Over here is the SVC-350 vocoder, my Chorus Echo, RE-501, and then the classics.” Chiu gestures to some beloved items: a JUNO-60, the JUPITER-4, and Roland Strings RS-09. “The 808, the 101, the JX-3P, which is gaining popularity now, but has been a workhorse forever. Please don’t tell anyone else about it because it keeps going up in price.”
Chiu is no stranger to newer Roland instruments, either; he composed an entire song for the GAIA 2 release using that synth alone. “When I gave them the track, they were like, ‘OK, but what drum machines did you use?’ I was like, ‘No, this is all GAIA 2 sequencer.’”
Spending so much time surrounded by the wonders of synthesis, it tracks that Chiu has emerged with some theories of his own. One tasty one revolves around the superiority of CV/Gate over MIDI. “With MIDI, there’s no easy way to separate the rhythm from the note. They’re tethered together,” he hypothesizes. “CV/Gate I love because the sequence can start to overlap in much more complex phrases.”
This freedom finds expression in his SML work. “I might have a sequencer that’s running 16 steps,” Chiu explains. “Then I might have another sequencer that’s clocking it and running its own sequence. It keeps cycling and pushing those 16 steps into infinite territory.”
"I might have a sequencer that's running 16 steps. Then I might have another sequencer clocking it and running its own sequence. It keeps cycling and pushing those 16 steps into infinite territory."
Making It Up
That infinite amount of combinations could easily relate to his varied output, but Chiu doesn’t see his trajectory as part of a conventional lineage. “As a synthesist, I never imagined myself operating like Josh Johnson or Anna Butterss, who have more traditional jazz careers where they are playing in tons of different groups.”
Still, with a new record, a solo tour on the horizon, and many projects on the boil, Chiu is grateful for where his musical path has taken him. “Being a huge fan of that community of musicians and the way that they’re able to operate is something I wanted to do, except I’m using a modular synthesizer or playing synthesizers.”
Jeremiah Chiu—making it up as he goes along, one step sequence at a time. There’s always a new aspect of sound to uncover, and that mystery keeps him engaged. “I don’t know how that’s going to happen,” he admits of his freewheeling methodology, “but yeah, let’s learn.”
