Frances Chang's 'been thinking bout confession' Builds an Orchestra Around a Hundred-Year-Old Piano
Frances Chang wrote most of been thinking bout confession on a hundred-year-old baby grand piano and recorded it between her home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and the Maspeth, Queens studio of longtime collaborator Andréa Schiavelli, who co-produced. That geography matters: RVNG Intl.’s own notes describe an album that “situates the unbridled emotion of Chang’s DIY roots within a complex and poetic sonic landscape,” and you can hear both halves of that sentence fighting productively for the whole forty minutes.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Schiavelli’s electric bass and additional piano do the structural work here, which frees the low end from having to be the pulse. Sarah Register’s master leaves enormous headroom — the quiet passages are genuinely quiet, not compressed toward the loud ones, and that decision is why the record’s silences land as events rather than gaps.
The Spatial Dynamics: Sammy Weissberg’s string arrangements, played by Shaleah Feinstein, Sean Lim, Edwin Kaplan and Austin Fisher, are placed behind the piano rather than swelling over it. Carolyn Hietter’s alto and Jake Tobin’s sopranino saxophone arrive on “No avatar” like a window opening. Bandcamp Daily caught the balance exactly: the experimental side — “the moments of silence, the juddery rhythms, the atonal piano” — is “tempered by conventional, yet by no means straightforward, musicality.”
Standout Performance
Chang herself, at that century-old piano. She plays it as a physical object, mechanical noise and all, and the electronic interventions layered around it never sand that physicality down.
Why It’s Certified
“Bad zen” and “I can feel the waves” set the terms. “Marry” hands its ending to Sylvia Gorelick’s spoken voice. “Job’s tears” and “Auratones of Desire” are the deep middle, and “Honestly” closes it out earning its title. As Bandcamp Daily put it: “For all the old instruments wrought into new forms, Chang has delivered an album that sounds timeless.” Certified great.