Ripples in air, soft and immense. Bells curl round a hillside to be cradled in an ear. Small animals worry their paws. A dazzle of piano, a glittery sheet of salt water. A cart lopes along a country road. Ghosts play ping-pong. Cascades from outer space. Some strange vessel encircles us in a scalded wood. Perhaps, above all, the sound of light, shattering, spilling, bouncing, teasing spectra, receding in stages.
I'm forging an inventory of fleeting sonics from Recordings from the Åland Islands, a beautiful record released by the Chicago-born label International Anthem. The record was created by the Los Angeles-based duo of synthesist Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer, along with several collaborators, while visiting a tiny Baltic island somewhere between Finland and Sweden. They traveled there to "help a friend and her mother barn raise a small hotel." Music was a byproduct, lured, as the beautiful illustrated booklet that accompanies the LP explains, by the atmospheric conditions of this place "where the summer sun never sets."
I have fond memories of purchasing this record on faith—I hadn't heard a note, didn't know the artists—from a very good store called Sonorama Disques in Montréal in 2022. But my associations with Recordings from the Åland Islands have shifted. Last autumn, a dear friend's wife was dying. She was someone who, over the years, I would also come to think of as a dear friend—a dear friend of another sort. Miro's was the kind of friendship that had to be earned on its own terms, and treasured all the more because of this. Everything transpired with merciless quickness: a surge of pain, a rush to a doctor, hospitalization, a confusion of tests, a move into palliative care. She and Martin were in Vancouver. Meanwhile, as this dying unfolded, I was traveling, first in Montréal—coincidentally enough—then Toronto, then various parts of Spain. News arrived in text messages. I responded in kind, waiting, imagining, uncertain, far away. I knew these dear friends were lovers of music and decided to send links via their streaming service of choice: the Keith Jarrett Trio's euphoric rendition of "God Bless the Child," Jeff Parker's quietly maundering Forfolks, and Recordings from the Åland Islands. Martin told me that, in those last weeks, it was the latter that Miro listened to and appreciated most.
I imagine she heard landscapes, waterways, places she could glide across or amidst without friction. Recordings from the Åland Islands is a spacious record, and I imagine she heard, in the spaces between sounds, another kind of silence. This music is probably a little too dynamic to meet the category of ambient, but it seems calibrated to induce meditative states. Its melodies are unfinished questions. Its field recordings are arrestingly intimate. It sounds like passage and transformation, like mysteries playful and calm, and maybe this makes it a record to usher you along your way somewhere, a place over the water, between the isles, constructed entirely from abundant light.
— José Teodoro’s prose has appeared in Brick, The Fiddlehead, and Geist. His performance works include Island, winner of the Lee Prize for New Canadian Plays, and Screen Door, which was adapted into the eponymous debut LP by Applied Silence, José’s group with musician-composer Stephen Lyons, available via Offseason Records. joseteodoro.com.
You can read José Teodoro's essay "Houston, We Have a Problem" in Issue 306 (Winter 2026). Order the issue now!
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