Frances Chang: An Interview from Memory

Frances Chang and Carol Discuss the Internet’s Role in the DIY scene, the Singer-Songwriter Pigeonhole, Violence, "Annoying Little Human Forms," and Other Ongoings.

Frances Chang and I spoke for about fifty minutes, and the entire conversation was deleted from my phone. Her DM response to this misfortune was: “I’m going to scribble down notes. It's like my dreams - it's fresh in my memory now.”

This perfectly encapsulates our conversation: lost to time, but still floating in the ether, much like how many of Frances’ songs had come to her for her latest project, Psychedelic Anxiety, released in February of 2024 under Ramp Local, a Philly-based label. The eight-track record is heart-wrenching, humorous, and ethereally disjointed in its instrumentation and narrative, presenting a multitudinous soundscape within each track. This is what makes the record so original: its sonic breadth makes way for a breadth of influence, resulting in a collage of sound that comes from within Chang’s subconscious. The following interview is an amalgamation of verbal and written communication between us, a uniquely honest and intimate exploration of her experience writing and performing her original work. 

This conversation is condensed for clarity and also isn’t entirely a real, verbal conversation that happened in the most traditional sense of the word.

I began by asking what some of her biggest influences were for Psychedelic Anxiety.

“At the time I was listening to a lot of ambient music, namely Terry Riley and (Hiroshi) Yoshimura, and was getting back into horror after being really sensitive to it for a long time. I saw Mother by Darren Aronofsky sort of accidentally and was super convinced that violence and gore were necessary for that film to communicate its message about the rape of mother earth and the divine feminine. I was also getting deep into Lars Von Trier: feeling into the way he subverts the dominant reality, the dominant agreed-upon perspective, and how he explores the humanity of “mental illness,” people who center spirituality, and dreams. I know he has edgelord status, but I think I do feel a lot of underdog alignment with outsider artists / fringey people who don’t necessarily capitulate to society as it is.”

Psychedelic Anxiety reaches the peak of this desperation with the track “First I Was Afraid,” a solemn re-imagining of “I Will Survive,” originally written by Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren. The original track’s tone and message are completely flipped; the melody and baroque twist of the track illustrate despair, rather than triumph. 

According to Frances, the track is the crux of the album:

“I wrote the song in my head before playing it for the first time on stage at the closing of this multimedia art show I co-organized with my friend Rosie (who also painted the painting and took the photo that ended up being the album art). I actually suggested we name the show “First I Was Afraid.” The theme of the show was about stepping into an unknown and unexplored part of the psyche, of experience –– essentially about the unconscious, and the winding nature of that exploration. It was a string of performances that led the audience through a labyrinthine basement. You said something about how that song conveys a baseline strength that comes through to you, where the use of the song makes sense but how it's also turned on its head. I think that’s super insightful, because the inspiration for that song (and how I thought of the show, too) was about this specific feeling I’ve gotten in certain “psychedelic” experiences I’ve had, where I face the skeletal nature of reality and feel this gritty kind of resignation. Like, not ecstasy and connection to everything, but a bottom-line feeling of self-reliance, a steely kind of  “I will survive.” This relates to the whole theme of psychedelic anxiety-just trying to figure out how to find comfort and peace in existence, and sometimes feeling that means recognizing a lot of grim truths.”

Frances seems deeply connected to the organic experiences of the body. Because of this, I was curious about her relationship with the online sphere and how it connects to the DIY scene she revolves in:

“I think the internet is awesome in its ability to collapse time and space and I think we can feel very personally resonant with people we share no immediate context with. It’s also great for emboldening shy people, and I think I’m a shy person. That being said, I don’t really know how much public social media supports the DIY scene or art in general, and I don’t think it’s a substitute for anything in person. I just see it as a tool to communicate with and connect with people, usually privately.”

For Frances, the internet’s best quality is its ability to serve as a platform for individualized, intimate communication.

“At the time of writing Psychedelic Anxiety, I was participating in a song project organized by Nick Llobet of Youbet. We all submitted a song a week –– the deadline was Sunday. I have no idea how many people had the password. It was a shifting group every week, with a dedicated core of people who submitted almost every week. I guess this would count as contributing to the influences of the album - there’s something motivational about having an audience to hear your song at the end of the day– we were that audience for each other. I was really inspired by the general level of creativity. I wouldn’t characterize Bandcamp as social media, though –– we just kind of used the Bandcamp platform to organize this community experience (it was all private). Personally, I like to use social media to reach out to people in my periphery, people “in the scene” who I don’t know as well, sometimes with an idea to collaborate. Sometimes to reach even further out, to people I don’t know at all but whose work I resonate with.” 

Bandcamp is a relatively new endeavor for me, and an invaluable, ethical shift. Upon recognizing streaming services’ negative relationship with artists, it has become imperative, as someone who benefits from the outcome of music artistry, to honor that work and protect its merit.

From perusing Frances’ profile on Bandcamp, a question arose: why did Frances go by two different artist names, Frances Chang and Plutoness?

“I have always thought of myself as more of an entity, represented by a moniker, than a singer-songwriter. In fact, I’d say from the first moment I started making music I never identified with the singer-songwriter thing, which seems very much about being a person with a face, who makes songs that are very legibly songs, that ideally someone could just play on guitar. Although guitar is my main instrument, I find it hard to actually play my songs live succinctly –– they exist as recordings first, and are so polyphonic, variable, and strange that it’s hard to capture as just a straightforward guitar song. I think I completely gave up and treated live performance as its own thing. I got really dry and minimal with the guitar –– no pedals –– rather than trying to imitate the idiosyncrasy of the recordings. But recently I've wanted to bring the effects back and approach it more as a watercolor. Anyway, I regret going by “Frances Chang.” I was advised to, honestly, and I just wasn’t 100% about Plutoness. But then I hoped that I’d be able to transcend my name, and see it as something beyond human avatar music. Lots of people use their names, people who aren’t singer-songwriters. Sometimes I think about how music, if it’s really good, transcends band names. I think there’s just something about the straightforwardness of the genre of “singer-songwriter” that I don’t relate to at all. So going by my name makes me feel (at least in my head, which is kind of the worst place for this influence to take hold) like I’m more pigeonholed into being a “singer-songwriter.” I guess my music just needs to transcend my human name and my annoying little human form. I’ll also probably fire up Plutoness again at some point.”

The singer-songwriter label also seems to connote a very singular, individual experience that Frances doesn’t work within, being so cognizant of the community she inhabits and its vast creative importance for her. I asked her about other projects that have influenced the creation of her album, whether it be her own side projects or friends and mutuals.

“Around the time that I was writing Psychedelic Anxiety, I was hanging out a lot at this shipping container near Myrtle Broadway that threw a lot of shows and had a lot of DIY anarcho programming, a free store, pirate radio broadcasts, etc. It felt super fringey to me, I dunno. I liked it. The programming was all about inclusivity and experimentation: at best, it was transcendent, and at worst, it felt too undiscerning. But at the time I was 100% about gathering new ideas and just opening up. There was a lot of improv. I tried a lot of new things while playing there. It felt like an incubator for people to try stuff. Some of the most vividly memorable sets there include: Chris Pitsioukos quartet, Andrea Schiavelli's keyboard improvisation set, Cradle electronic set, a SPEC (a short-lived improv band) set that was actually just the best thing I’ve ever seen, this person named Ruby Rainbow who made chiptunes, and a sound-poetry set by Gabe Raines. I tried a lot of spoken word stuff there, maybe that was where I developed that impulse a lot further. I played the weirdest and maybe most depressing Valentine’s Day show at the container once that was very poorly-attended. It was freezing –– the place was heated by a wood-burning stove and it was sub-zero that night. My roommate was one of the main organizers there. She made the video for “p much deranged” off my last record. She is from Israel and is an anti-occupation activist there –– she was in New York for a while but moved back to be with her mom during the pandemic. the video is so interesting to look at now, as it was shot at the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum (formerly known as the Palestine Archaeological Museum) in East Jerusalem. It really is this ancient relic that has been completely cordoned off by a colonial state (Israel).”

Frances is not only a music artist, but also a visual one. It permeates her answers, from the inclusion of film in her influences to the fervor with which she discusses visual art collaboration:

I basically pay attention to what intuitively resonates with me. It’s very clear to me when I like someone’s work. I mean, I feel like I have met so many incredible “underground” artists who have so much to say, whose practices I respect so deeply, and I love the idea of letting my music videos be a platform to showcase some of those people. And of course it comes back to a artistic resonance, so I feel like it can coexist with the music in a way where the two can inform each other. For Eye Land, which was the first track I was encouraged to make a video for, I was feeling so visually uninspired (even clothes wise) and I really didn’t feel like making a video of me lip syncing. It’s kind of like the singer-songwriter thing: the algorithm favors faces, it’s about marketability. I am a video/multimedia artist myself, and I just think music videos don’t need to be this cheesy MTV “I’m a celebrity” thing, although it can be fun, I guess. But I wasn’t feeling it at this point and I was up late at night scrolling on Instagram and saw my IRL-friend Will’s drawings that he had just posted, and I was reminded of the fact that I think his drawings are awesome. Kind of anime, but kind of not, and a lot of fantasy influence. I don’t know, a perfect balance of things for me, and rough around the edges, which is important to me. So I got the idea that we should make a video, without realizing that animation takes so much time and work. Like an impossible amount. I looped in my friend Wendy Cong Zhao who is a much more experienced independent animator, whose work I also really admire, and we hauled ass to make this video. I even chipped in drawing and animating myself. It’s funny because our villain for the story was a “fashion demon” – the whole thing was kind of a comment on visual evil–the way industries that are centered on the visual can, without context, adopt the appearance of things that have actual meaning in creative communities. Basically some of the things that were sucking the inspiration out of my visual life. China Rain was another such artist who I met at a show I played in philly, where she’s based. She’s a poet, in part, and later that year she invited me to read poetry at an event she was throwing, but I couldn’t make it and she never asked me again, which bummed me out. Her instagram presence was actually weird and inspiring to me, and not even about poetry formally so much as about movement and her body and just her really specific perspective. So I guess some people are actually able to use social media to create art in a way that is actually impactful, but I still feel reluctant to fully get behind that idea. “Ya A Mirage” was a song with a very urgent, kind of wild vibe, and I thought it was the perfect song to give to China, who seems to have some of that vibe herself. I really love what she did with it. (That’s her in the video, not me). We played together in Philly shortly after (when I was on a solo tour with my friend/ramp local label mate Kolb) that song came out and I’d never heard her poetry before - before the show we joked, what if I didn’t like her poetry? I think she joked about “what If I don’t like your song” when I asked her to make the video, too. But she actually really liked it. I mean obviously, I asked her to make a video for that song for a reason. Haha. Not saying I’m 100% foolproof and psychic but I can pick up on a lot with my gut. All I know is, I know when I resonate with people’s work. I guess nothing else is a guarantee.

With “Rate my Aura,” my idea was to make a sort of Adam Curtis-style documentary with a secret thesis. I made it myself with a lot of found footage. I do actually appear in this one as a “talking head”. I filmed the ending in Sunset Park’s Chinatown, near where I live. I was kind of amazed by the anarchy of the fireworks in such stunning density, how they echoed bombs and explosions, like in war. But this was such a joyous mirror image of that: children and parents playfully defacing cop cars and welcoming a new year with unbridled chaos. It made me think about how we need opportunities to express and experience anarchy, opportunities to fight and dance and channel our vital energy in playfully “violent” ways. I’m wondering how we can channel that human violence/fight instinct into something that feels good, that is ultimately harmless, but contains all that exuberance and irreverence, fulfilling our collective need to defy control and authority.

In February of 2023, I had the pleasure of seeing Frances live at Sundown Bar in Ridgewood, New York. She was accompanied by her drummer, Liza Winter, while her bassist, Andrea Schiavelli, was out sick for the night. It was unfortunate to have missed the additional support from another valued musician of hers, but I was completely enchanted by Frances and Liza’s stage chemistry, who seemed converse subliminally between tracks and lulls. Frances’ music is so special because of this variance of progression, and I wondered about the connection and intimacy that was required for a project with such unpredictability. I asked Frances how she met Andrea and Liza, and what her experience working with them on this project was like.

“So I met Liza at a show basically right before the pandemic, and then I saw that she posted a lot of videos of herself improvising on the drum kit in her practice space, and it felt very elastic –– I had held out on committing to any band members for a while because it kind of feels hard to switch it up after you start playing with people - that might just be a me problem. I mean you form this little family. But I knew I had that problem, so I waited, and I knew I wanted someone who seemed really flexible and relative about time. I reached out to them on Instagram –– see, augmented reality communication tool! –– and we started playing together as a duo. We have since done that a couple of times when Dre hasn’t been able to play with us, and they seem to feel it’s incomplete or weird, but I always think about how we initially played together without any other instrumentation. I actually love the feeling of switching it up –– it has an improvisational feel, like there’s a different feeling and we need to listen and be sensitive to that, rather than just resting on what we know to be true. Liza has said in the past that each time we play the songs they feel like different songs, and I want that to always be true! I hope it still is. 

But to comment on what you’re saying about intimacy, it does take intimacy for me to be able to play with someone. Not like I can’t play with a stranger, but there has to be a connection. Obviously. Liza has always been really supportive and always seemed to connect to the music and the overall formlessness very personally. 

Dre and I became really close during the pandemic, although coincidentally we had both had mutual friends in a different scene a long time ago, and he moved into the first room I lived in in Brooklyn after I moved out. A friend burned me a CD of his songs (Eyes of Love) and I really identified with them… I was like, “This person is just like me!” But I never actually felt like we got along in person. So when I moved into a house that he lived in during the pandemic (different house), we became friends really quickly and started making a lot of music together, mostly improvisational active-ambient music under the name Die Artist. Also this weird EP of songs, Dilleen. Also I wrote a poem and sang on his recent album of compositions, this place is a cemetery. He also helped me record extra instrumentation, mostly drums (Liza) and bass (he played bass) in his studio at the time. His influence on the record is subtle but also so impactful: I love the way he hears things, he has a very specific take on aesthetics, has very original ideas, and is very detail-oriented but also very visionary. I think that this makes him a really good designer of his own work and also a great engineer and producer. I think I am almost the exact opposite –– I don’t plan, I don’t design. I just let it be, I am attuned to where it’s coming from, and I steer intuitively.  When I collaborate with people, I choose people who I believe in and basically let them do their thing. But I guess this method of doing things requires that you switch things up to try different things. I have collaborated a bunch with my friend Carolyn Hietter (financial collapse, sweet baby jesus), an experimental saxophonist, and sometimes we play my songs as a duo.”

I had initially found Frances through a friend, who had seen her open for the rising cyber-folk band, @. I was curious to know how Frances had gotten connected to the duo (Victoria and Stone).

“I know Victoria through her solo project, Brittle Brian, through the extended DIY scene. I’ve played with her in Philly a couple of times, and her work really “resonates” with me, haha. I first heard @ over the pandemic when they put that record out on Bandcamp, before carpark re-released it. I became a fan of Stone’s solo project at that time, too, Spy in the Sky. Jake from Ramp Local actually booked that show as a “Ramp Local and friends” showcase, but he asked me what last act to book, and it was my idea to ask @.”

I’ve done my diligence to keep most details from Frances’ responses. Somehow, nearly every word held “resonance” (haha) and power–she knew how to express even her most abstract ideas with clarity. There is an unwavering love of community at the core of her pursuits and desires, an itch to connect with the artists alongside her, the audience, and herself, all at once.

Frances Chang’s music makes the nonsensical become sensical. Rhythms that seem to pitter on the edge of nowhere return to a core swagger, a clear vision she has constructed out of her own chaos. The beauty, the hidden rhythm within this disorder, coupled with confessional lyricism, bares itself to the listener. It is no wonder that at a time in which I am living in such naked emotion, I am relieved to see someone else doing the same in such a special way.