Frances Chang

Frances Chang is a musician and multimedia artist living and performing in New York. Combining use of conventional instrumentation, playful electronics, and poetry, her unique strain of experimental songwriting deals with disrupting accepted reality. Her 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.

Her second solo album, Psychedelic Anxiety, explores overwhelming, existential, vertigoic feelings, through a kind of world-building. A strain of metaphysical unease is present throughout the record’s 8 tracks, and charged by all things occultish.

It’s a colorful yet spartan body of work, roomy and playful, capturing a genre Chang refers to as slacker prog — offbeat, even jarring, but brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance. Around her, guitar sputters and stops. Vocals branch off like vines on the side of an old house. Songs are freaky miniatures in the way that a Broadcast song is a freaky miniature. Infusing artifacts of the mundane with an otherworldly aura, even her love songs live more in the realm of fantasy-horror than the romantic.