Electronic music producer Ian Chang brings us a new track, 舞狮 Lion Dance, the opener for his first full-length release, 属 Belonging. The artist, who originally hails from Hong Kong, draws influence from the likes of Flying Lotus, Shigeto, Flume, Burial and Nosaj Thing to craft his experimental style of music. 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. With his unique blend of instrumentation and production prowess, he breathes a new kind of human vulnerability into electronica.
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, neighbourly 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.
The piercing album opener 舞狮 Lion Dance, is a track that highlights his energetic blend of percussive precision and hyper-sonic electronics.
Listen to 舞狮 Lion Dance below
