Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer

★★★★ Recordings From The Åland Islands INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM. CD/DL/LP

Ambient field trip to a Baltic archipelago.

Music journalists have long been prone to make up new genres at the drop of a hat, but something akin to an ‘ambient jazz’ moment really does seem to be happening. To file alongside Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders’ MOJO Album Of 2021 Promises, Nala Sinephro’s Space 1.8 and various records involving Carlos Niño and Sam Gendel, we can now add this enveloping set. Chiu, a keyboardist, and Honer, a viola player who’s worked on sessions for Beyoncé and Fleet Foxes, left their LA home to spend time on the Åland Islands, a remote location between Sweden and Finland. These field recordings, New Age epiphanies and beatific jams are the results of the trip: an immersive audio tour that acts as a kind of Baltic analogue to ambient jazz pin-up boy Jon Hassell’s more equatorial excursions.