I Can Feel The Waves

Description

Multimedia artist and avant-garde musician Frances Chang, originally from Brooklyn, is disrupting established norms with her unique and enchanting compositions. Her songs explore the tension between the personal experience of an idiosyncratic language and the need to understand (and be understood) through a collective language. In “I can feel the waves,” her new single and first track on RVNG Intl., a piano-centric melody is adorned with raw electronics and poetic vocals. The track boldly demonstrates Chang’s talent for writing that is both unconventional and captivating, ushering in a genre she calls “slacker prog”: sprawling and playful, quirky and sometimes dissonant, brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance. The B-side, “Marry,” is a breezy and laid-back composition, with lithe, intrepid kick drum rhythms bubbling beneath pianistic textures until a dialogue, performed between Chang and Sylvia Gorelick, takes center stage in the track’s final moments. As the instrumental continues its free-form stride, the conversation, inspired by films such as Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret and Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl!, as well as Broken Social Scene’s Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, turns to the relationship between inner subjectivity and the external necessity of “keeping it discreet.” Where is Frances taking us from here? A piano is at the center, synthesizers and strings enfolding it. A little less tension, much more production. Shadows will be met, forgotten skeletons will be exhumed. Music excavated from the most subtle and profound layers of cerebral and shared experiences. Truly unique music.