IARC Releases Album By New Age Music Legend Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer

International Anthem (IARC) releases a new album by Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer. The album – called The Closest Thing to Silence – is an expansion of a collaboration originally undertaken by the three artists for the BBC Radio 3 program Late Junction. 

The album's lead single “Écoute Au Loin” perfectly encircles the middle ground captured by the three musicians on The Closest Thing to Silence. Starting with a manipulated loop of woodwinds played by Kalma, Honer's strings swirl like a spell around the mix, as Chiu's synthesizer and drum machine programming pushes the composition forward. A breakdown section in the middle of the song includes a sample of Kalma's voice, as he discusses ideas and in-process directions for the music.

The second previously shared single, “A Treasure Chest,” enters with meditative organ, as modular synths bring a rhythmic pulse from underneath. Of all the songs on The Closest Thing to Silence, this one most prominently features the viola playing of Marta Sofia Honer (whose extensive resumé of string work includes performances and/or recordings with Beyoncé, Makaya McCraven, Ms Lauryn Hill, Angel Olsen, Kamasi Washington, Adrian Younge, and many more). Honer enters about halfway through, after a saturated organ swell gives way to a bed of looping, bird-like warbles. In the final section, Honer's viola lines are synthesized into a prismatic tangle of sound.

In August 2022 the Australia-based, French born new age musician and electronic music composer 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 & Marta Sofia Honer, whose critically-acclaimed duo debut Recordings from the Åland Islands had been released just a few months earlier. His invitation was received with enthusiasm, as Chiu had long been a fan of Kalma's work, even citing him as a major influence on his approach to electronic music composition.

Their initial work was broadcasted on Late Junction in September of 2022; but simultaneously, Kalma, Chiu and Honer began expanding their collaboration. The three artists' collective approach was born in improvisation and realized via collage-based editing. There are snippets of improvised playing from each musician, edited together with recordings that Kalma had made in the 70s at GRM, and even moments of audio notes — like Kalma explaining his ideas — that would make it into the final mixes.

Ultimately, the collection of music they created highlights the work of all three musicians, intertwining the kind of contextual immersion heard on Chiu & Honer's Recordings from the Åland Islands with an intergenerational reverence for (and the undeniable presence of) Kalma's decades-spanning body of work. It is work that has definitively enshrined him as one of the true, transcendent pioneers and sages of new age and fourth-world music.

That reverence is affirmed by the album title chosen by the group, which is taken from a quote by Kalma included in a documentary released by RVNG Intl, as part of the 2014 compendium/retrospective An Evolutionary Music. Perhaps coincidental, Kalma's quote was a slight modulation of a legendary ECM Records motto, as he said: “Music is the closest thing to silence.”