属 Belonging, Ian Chang’s first full-length album, is like a cyborg - part purring mechanism, part animate bio-mass rising from primordial ooze.
In nine concise, largely instrumental pop songs, Chang conjures a personal cosmos: the listener feels as if we might reach out and touch 属 Belonging 's jagged and tender aural sculptures. At every level, his music sings with earnest and deceptive simplicity. The album's melodies are intimate, its rhythms rewarding, and yet, just beneath the surface glimmers innovation, as if the neurons firing in each melodic idea have become audible. From the tradition of Bjork, Burial, and Flying Lotus, Chang breathes a new kind of human vulnerability into electronica.
When Chang describes his creative process, the phrase "third culture” keeps coming up. Born in the colony of Hong Kong in 1988, Chang has lived a nomadic life. Stationed out of New York for 10 years, he built an impressive roster of progressive pop collaborators such as Moses Sumney, Joan As Policewoman, and Matthew Dear, among others, all while performing internationally and recording as a member of Son Lux and Landlady. Now relocated to Dallas, Texas, Chang's discovered an inquisitive confidence that can only come from newfound isolation. Between tours, he dedicated himself to developing his international musical language, facilitated by a home studio and a burgeoning relationship.
Chang’s debut full-length record 属 Belonging was released in April 2020 via City Slang. Chang's magic starts with his method: from an improvised foundation of sampled percussion, he follows the innate logic of a musical conversation, allowing his compositional forms to reveal themselves. The album's three vocal features - Kazu (Blonde Redhead), Kiah Victoria and Hanna Benn - weren’t anticipated at the project's outset; they arose like friendships, unpredictably complex and increasingly rare, a consequence of Chang's ubiquitous receptivity. Whereas on his EP Spiritual Leader (2017) Chang limited himself to capturing unedited performances without overdubs, on this release the percussionist expands his palate, burrowing deeper into a layered, symphonic subconscious. Consequently, Chang's formidable growth as a producer is on display. Reflecting the album's bottom-up, performance-as-composition construction, his music conveys an intuitive sense of wholeness, carrying its experimental ethos without pretense. The resulting album unfolds like a confessional exploration, complicating the lines between rhythm and melody, modernity and antiquity, exuberance and meditation.
On 属 Belonging, the sense that nothing is planned yet all falls into place allows us to reconsider what we really need in order to belong. In his willingness to start over again and again, to let the music guide him (instead of the other way around), Chang reveals a home without boundary. 属 Belonging introduces a musical contradiction: complete yet ever-evolving, neighborly yet global, precise yet instinctive, familiar yet innovative. Ian Chang's debut both satisfies and challenges modern expectations of catchy electronica. May we find ourselves at home in the paradox.
Ian is also a member of Academy Award® and BAFTA-nominated band Son Lux, a trio that strives to question deeply held assumptions about how music is made and reconstruct it from a molecular level. What began as a solo project for founder Ryan Lott expanded in 2014, thanks to a kinship with Ian and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia too strong to ignore. The group strengthened their chemistry and honed their collective intuition while creating, releasing, and touring six recordings, including Brighter Wounds (2018) and triple album Tomorrows (2021). The result is a carefully cultivated musical language rooted in curiosity and balancing opposites that largely eschews genre and structural conventions. And yet, the band remains audibly indebted to iconoclastic artists in soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation who themselves carved new paths forward. Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions. Son Lux has most recently scored A24’s Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once (March 2022). The full score album features new collaborations with Mitski, David Byrne, Randy Newman, and Moses Sumney, among others.
Gear affiliations
Drums: C&C Drum Co.
Cymbals: Istanbul Agop Cymbals
Electronics: Sunhouse
Heads: Evans
Sticks: ProMark Drumsticks
Kick Beater: Low Boy