In 2016, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer were working separately in Chicago’s flourishing avant-jazz scene when both were tapped to participate in a performance of Terry Riley’s “In C” hosted by the Bitchin Bajas. A foundational work in American minimalism, “In C” consists of 53 “melodic patterns” played in sequence, with the catch that each player decides how many times they’d like to repeat a fragment before moving on to the next; no two versions are ever exactly the same. The meeting—and the piece—proved auspicious for the music Chiu and Honer would go on to create together. For their third full-length collaboration, the analog synth whiz and violist grappled with the age-old question of how to capture chance in a static piece of recorded music. Different Rooms is a carefully calibrated bricolage of live spontaneity and studio craft, bridged by two artists’ shared passions for process, collaboration, and the beauty of the mundane.

One of Chiu and Honer’s first joint ventures was a trip to the Baltic Sea, which they documented in the sweeping expanses of 2022’s Recordings from the Åland Islands. Different Rooms plays it closer to home. A short film accompanying the album’s release renders such majestic tableaus as a washing machine, a fogged train window, and water flowing from a calcified faucet. In place of far-flung field recordings, Chiu and Honer have gathered the sounds we hear throughout our daily lives and within our own homes. Wind chimes jingle on “Long and Short Delays” and “One of Eight,” and ice cubes are unmistakably dropped in a glass midway through the title track. Opener “Mean Solar Time” could replace Squarepusher’s “Tommib” in Lost in Translation as Scarlett Johansson studies the rhythms of downtown Manhattan from her hotel window, the staccato modal pulse gradually yielding to the ambiance of an empty train platform.

Having departed from its predecessor’s Nordic terroir, Different Rooms nonetheless arrives coated in frost. “Long and Short Delays” might be a long-lost cousin of Biosphere’s glacial, sonar-deep opus Substrata, left buried for decades under Arctic ice. Honer’s patient bowing opens up pockets of breathable air amid Chiu’s murky keyboards. One of two longer suites that make up the record’s midsection, “Before and After Signs” passes two nebulous minutes before reaching some semblance of structure via a grounding bass refrain. Plucked strings, frigid organ lines, glassy piano, and garbled radio transmissions (another Biosphere calling card) intersect haphazardly in midair—not unlike the way the tapestry of a region’s frog calls shifts as different species emerge from hibernation.