why we love this

Silence is often considered to be the absence of sound, yet this record approaches it as a raw marble block containing a form yearning to be realized. A transportive reflection on what is and isn’t music.

about the record

In August 2022, Australia-based, French-born fourth-world music legend Ariel Kalma was invited to participate in BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction series of special collaborations. The program pairs artists who have not previously worked together to create new music cooperatively.

Kalma was quick to suggest working with two musicians whom he had never met: International Anthem recording artists Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, whose critically acclaimed duo debut 'Recordings from the Åland Islands' had been released just a few months earlier. An invitation was sent to Chiu and Honer, and it was received with great enthusiasm.

The essential structure of the Late Junction collaboration was for the artists to work together to create around twenty minutes of music. They began passing music back and forth, some started by Kalma and some by Honer and Chiu, with each adding to or editing the track before returning it to the other. The music would only go back and forth a few times before being finalized.

After meeting their twenty minute goal for the program, the three musicians sent along their work to the producers of Late Junction. However, there was a nagging suspicion that this wasn’t the end of the story. There were several pieces that they had nearly completed but that weren’t sent for inclusion in the radio program. Kalma, Chiu, and Honer agreed that they would continue to work together to try to push the music further. The freshly minted trio felt like there was much more to be said and more work to be done. The Late Junction program was broadcast in September of 2022. Simultaneously, Kalma, Chiu, and Honer began expanding upon the music they had started for the purpose of the broadcast, working diligently on the music for several months.