A boundary-pushing musician and multi-media artist from Brooklyn, New York, Frances Chang disrupts accepted reality through her unique and enchanting compositions. Chang’s songs are an exercise in communication, probing the tension between idiosyncratic personal experience and the drive to understand, and be understood, through a collective language.
For “I can feel the waves,” Chang’s new single and debut on RVNG Intl., a piano-centric melody is ornamented with primitive electronics and poetic vocals. The track boldly demonstrates Chang’s strength for unconventional yet contagious songwriting, and pioneers a genre the artist refers to as “slacker prog”: roomy and playful, offbeat and occasionally jarring, brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance.
The b-side, “Marry,” is a rollicking yet laid-back composition, with undaunted wobbly kicks bubbling under pianistic textures until a dialogue, acted out between Chang and Sylvia Gorelick, takes the foreground in the final moments of the track. As the instrumental carries its freewheeling pulse forward, the conversation, inspired by films like Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret and Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl!, along with Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl,” turns toward the relationship between internal subjectivity and the external necessity of “staying small.”
Where is Frances headed from here? A piano is at the center, synths and strings swelling around its shoulders. A little less tension, a lot more production. Some shadows will be encountered, some forgotten skeletons unearthed. Music excavated from the subtler, deeper layers of cerebral and shared experiences. Music that is truly its own.