Tell us more about your work as a multidisciplinary artist - whether it be poetry, visuals, graphic design etc - and how that informs the music you create.  Is there a medium you’re specifically drawn to?  How do you collage these different forms of expression and how do you decide which to keep separate?  

Capturing an experience in time is essential to what I want to express through art. Before I made music I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I quickly realized I don’t have the patience for film. I wanted the rewards to come more swiftly, succinctly, autonomously. So I found myself recording songs. I’m mostly interested in the role of music within a cinematic universe. I like seeing it as an internal monologue, the truth of the moment, expressed in varying degrees of obliqueness to the audience receiving it. 

 If I consider music only one dimension within a cinematic universe, it relates to the visual. I like working with video, which is kind of like the “quick” version of film, in a variety of ways. I think visual accompaniment can help deepen structural understanding of a song. But just as often I prefer letting a song exist on its own, leaving the imagination free while it listens. It’s kind of like how movie adaptations of books that I love taint my impression of the book forever. 

 I’m very into language. I’ve been told I can be “fucking verbose”. But words come most easily for me in conversation. I think this relates to my interest in capturing events in time as they actually happen, and sculpting them as they happen, rather than painstakingly constructing the experience itself. Poetry appeals to me both because of its quickness and its ability to bypass the assumption that language needs to make sense. Also its strange ability to get right to the point. Also its total unsellability. I like recording poetry, which can bring it to an improvisational, conversational place. Or have an actor deliver my words in a video. Quickness and embodiment are important to me in art. I do feel like I need work on cultivating mastery, but primarily I think I’m here to channel the moment.

 Most everything I make I consider to be “poems”, in a sense. But I’m a person who has a hard time keeping separate notebooks for separate subjects. Things tend to bleed together.

FRANCES CHANG
MIX

You’ve lived in Brooklyn for a number of years and record at home - places that can be both intense, inspiring, comforting, claustrophobic - how does the environment around you influence your work?   

Being primarily a bedroom artist in a city like New York is like being in a pressure cooker, and as far as I can tell, my creative process often benefits from that pressure. Sometimes it’s hampered by it. It depends a lot on where I’m living, who I’m living with, and the psychic boundaries of that space. I’ve been thinking a lot about claustrophobia - right now I’m answering these questions as I’m driving around California exploring the desert and mountains, and the contrast is bringing up a lot. New York City is a beautiful place, and it’s also intensely claustrophobic - not only physically, but mentally. It’s a place where people pride themselves on and compete on the basis of their intellect. Participation in the art culture involves subtle knowledge. People and their concepts take up a ton of psychic space. 

These thought forms are less present in nature. Instead, there are canyons, trees, waterfalls - natural beings that take up space with their presence. And in these environments I feel different, kind of stripped down and free. I feel like in New York there’s a way in which art has to stake out its unique place in conversation with the art around it.  I appreciate the idea that one might be able to express themselves in a context where value is not determined by relative identity. But I’m also very interested in and inspired by people and community and relationality, even if it can feel suffocating at times. So I’m constantly drawn down into the belly of the beast. 

I think about escaping. When I think of what a home of my own would be, I think of a cabin in the woods. Or maybe desert. Whether that vision is my heart’s true desire or simply wanting what I don’t have, I don’t really know. One of these days.

You mentioned that you’d recently come to terms with the fact that you’ll be first and foremost an artist your whole life - especially in a culture where most everyone has a “day job” how do you ensure that your creative output bleeds into your day to day and remains front and center?  

I don’t think there’s a very obvious answer to this. Prioritizing music has more to do with the fact that even when I’ve tried to let it go, it seems there isn’t really anything else for me. Renewing my commitment to this path is understanding that it is a historically difficult one to feel externally validated by, and to proceed with full knowledge that I will again and again come up against feeling purposeless, invalidated, and childish under the societal gaze I too often inhabit. I anticipate that the way I make money will continue to change and that at points circumstances will push me to work jobs that take up more of my day to day. My most recent understanding of putting music and art first, forever, has less to do with it being my job (although any material success would at best help to fuel its continuous possibility) and more to do with it being a lifestyle - to live skillfully. And beautifully, when possible. And to make things. I’d like to cultivate a life where all of my interests form little streams of income so that making a living can be a natural extension of living. We’ll see!

How would you define collaboration?  

The way I approach collaboration tends to be open handed - I feel like my music benefits from the addition of other people. I’m a loner at heart, I vacation under a rock. I think it’s a partially involuntary defense against being overstimulated - not letting in too too much information. Otherwise I’d be a nervous wreck. On some level I’m a total sponge. I once heard that each of us is an amalgam of the five people we spend the most time with. The best I can do is put myself in the way of people I’m inspired by. 

Basically for me the bulk of collaboration lies in the choice of who to collaborate with. I try to play with people who share philosophical and other felt similarities with me, whose sensibilities I admire. And then I let them add their voice with minimal instruction, and I’m influenced and inspired by them in turn. I like letting chance and improvisation play heavily into collaborations, kind of trusting the magic of nonverbal understanding, affinity, presence and synchronicity to weave things together. I would define collaboration as cybernetic. It involves feedback. It’s when both or all parties are producing things in response to each other that they wouldn’t have on their own.

There seems to be a real embodiment of both more abstract spirituality contrasting with specific details that paint a vivid picture of a very modern reality - how does your songwriting reflect the scope of the lens in which you view the world?

Life is full of mystery. Sometimes the desire to see behind the veil is clarifying and beautiful and fills me with deep clear profound gratitude, sometimes it’s clarifying but terrifying, and sometimes it leads down a labyrinthine hole of fear and anxiety where I get stuck in some never-present well of dread. Sometimes trying to stay in touch with the universe makes me feel dissociated, and sometimes it’s greatly grounding. I like to think that as time goes on I get more grounded but all I can say for sure is it keeps changing.

I think the way that my songwriting leans towards the slackerishly proggy reflects a desire to impart things as they really are, the way that my feelings and perspective change every day, sometimes throughout the day, if I pay attention. I also think the mood of my music often reflects a kind of dysphoria between seeking some kind of spiritual meaning in life and sometimes falling from that heightened place and feeling as if I’ve lost the thread completely. 

I think reality is first and foremost a shared agreement among people and that part of why these ideas - mysticism and modernity - seem to contrast is because there’s resistance in the modern world to accepting mystery and ambiguity. We want to feel like we know everything. I’m always trying to figure out what magic even is. Is it psychology? The invisible power of the untapped unconscious? Some kind of cosmic structure or law?

Tell us more about the recording process/inspiration behind this new track!

A lot of my songs happen when there’s some kind of fire under my ass, whether that is a deadline, an obligation to someone else, some kind of creative structure, or an extreme emotional backup I can’t process any other way. I recorded “Spiral in Houston” in my bedroom on a Sunday afternoon for a weekly song collective organized by my friend Nick Llobet. I was participating faithfully in the song club at the time. The song came out as it often does, in one fell swoop. I don’t really remember the details of how. Usually a brick forms where the words and chords intersect in a way where I’m like, “yes, that is supposed to be that way.” And things emerge from the fog from there. I had just acquired an MC-202 sampler. I played finger drums with it. Andrea Schiavelli helped mix this song (as well as the entire album that it’s from), lending his subtle ear to my home recordings and creating expert spaciousness in the layers of vocals.

This track is mostly about a time when I was in Houston over the holidays with my family to attend a memorial for my late grandma. It was a somber backdrop for the dark place I was in personally - an important relationship of mine had just combusted and I was reckoning with that. The song is about psychic self-harm. And how that can take a compulsive, spiraling shape. It also ties in some of the themes that you picked up on with your previous question, the dark side of looking for answers.

Any under the radar musical peers we need to know?  

Some lone wolves I love and admire: For a long time I worked closely with Mike Naideau, whose solo music is really special. He’s recorded music for decades under his name and more recently a few records under the name Alibi. His singular style and perspective, in experimental, direct IV drip form, has been deeply influential to me. He is feral in a ridiculously cool way. 

Someone who has been so inspiring to me musically and artistically is my friend Shlomit Strutti. She was an organizer at a relatively short-lived but legendary shipping container turned art and music community space near Myrtle-Broadway. The Container was a money-free zone whose primary function seemed to be about experimentation. I expanded into a lot of new territory musically and performatively during the live sets I played there. Shlomit is a shining image in my mind of how social organizing can be artistic practice. As a musician she’s someone who demonstrates clearly the part of music that is about channeling the spirit and the moment, rather than the part that is about academia and technicality. 

Lately I’ve been working with Andrea Schiavelli aka Eyes of Love on a number of projects. We kind of go way back but for most of that time I’ve known his music better. It always resonated acutely with me in its articulate relationship to the *taboo of sentimentality* and its colorful, quiet drama, and as we’ve become closer the mystery of my affinity with his music has uncovered itself somewhat. 

Another cool collaborator of mine is Hunter Davidsohn, who co-produced and mixed one of my upcoming releases. He has a studio in Johnson City, NY, overflowing with beautiful gear that he’s literally breathed life back into, whether it be dried up drum skins that he rehydrated with lard or a Neotek Series 1 from 1975 that once belonged to the New York Philharmonic. Before we were friends, I was sleeping on the couch in his house while on tour years ago, and in the middle of the night I woke up to some kind of angelic, unearthly sound. In the morning I was like, “I heard the most beautiful thing,” and someone was casually like, “Oh, that was Hunter”. It was just him playing acoustic guitar and softly singing in his room. 

What’s special about the mix you’ve made?

This mix connects a lot of disparate inspirations and ideas, a kind of a mood board for what I want to channel right now. A combination of the ballad, the realm of the crooner, and how that sentimentality intersects with the proggy or the theatrical, and how that high drama and linearity intersects with the cinematic, scores and soundtracks, and how that filmic purpose intersects with the improvisational, like the Beefheart opener, and how that intersects with the brutality, or experimental angularity of something like Dean Blunt or Naomi Punk. It’s vaguely spazzy but there’s a psychic continuity that doesn’t break. There’s also a personal thread running through my choices - it’s a bit diaryish - songs from memorable moments and events of the past few months, tributes to people I’ve collaborated with, people I love. Aren’t all mixes diaryish though? Some other active themes: fantasy, poetry, slice of life anime, yin representation, defying the Spotify pop song that caters directly to our shrinking attention spans and capitalistically warped dopamine brains.

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