Been Thinking Bout Confession - Purple

Been thinking bout confession, the third studio album by musician and producer Frances Chang, is a synth-tinged experimental pop excavation of the self and the vast unknown depths it contains. Largely written on a hundred-year-old baby grand piano, the album situates the unbridled emotion of Chang's DIY roots within a complex and poetic sonic landscape that interweaves orchestral arrangements with idiosyncratic, almost sculptural, electronic and analog interventions. Born to immigrant parents in Chicago, Chang's sonic ethos was formed in the space between spontaneous and recorded auditory encounters. Childhood memories of dancing to her mother playing piano in the living room were as impactful as that of the reflexive shock of hearing her own singing voice recorded for the first time on a My First Sony music toy. An early exposure to film solidified her persistent interest in the narrative and interior qualities of art across all forms, as did an almost desperate thirst for transportive literature. A filmic strain persists in her music, which can sound at times like the score to a psychological thriller or a fantasy epic, and at others, a coming-of-age indie movie.Chang's childhood love of medieval RPG series King's dislocating capacity to feel vaster than the "real" world. This feeling persists throughout the uncanny valley world-building of been thinking bout confession, which the artist describes as being "sort of a Russian doll of perspective between the digital and the physical." Disparate early sonic influences like Madonna's "Like a Prayer" and Jesus Christ Superstar served as cultural touchstones and proof of the boundless capacity of the voice to convey emotion.Largely self-taught as a musician, Chang's own voice has an intuitive quality that suggests a sense of a perpetual searching. While Chang's musical practice grew largely autonomously and bedroom-centered, her formative live experiences took place in underground punk, emo, and post-hardcore scenes in the band giant peach, followed by solo experimental, spoken word and instrumental internet releases under various pseudonyms. 2022's self-released support your local nihilist, Chang's first album of songs under her given name, marked a return to a surrealist, more intimate sound, with a stretching and shifting meter; in her 2024 follow-up, Psychedelic Anxiety, time remained elastic, but this time with a drummer and bass player, with whom she soon formed a core live trio. In her early foray into the world of movie music, she has quickly fallen into a niche of composing scores for heady political art films calling for inventive, provocative soundtracks (Sunset Seduction, dir. Charles de Agustin, 2024; Where Can We Be Found? dir. EcoRove, 2023) that dangle melodic threads amid a noisy, drony, musique concrète framework.Throughout the album, the most significant musical presence is Chang's voice: both pillow-soft and oddly dry. Sitting uncomfortably close to the camera, it's often the loudest element in the mix. The proximity creates a bizarre depth-of-field, recalling the album's persistent dialogue with cinema. Here we have not spectacle, but close-ups; not plot, but ethical and philosophical restlessness. The songs move like scenes, quiet reckonings with the friction between inner life and external demand.What emerges is a coming-of-consciousness film rendered in sound, where Chang's vocal plays both narrator and witness. Through a steadily-spiraling poeticism, she guides us through a chaotic architecture, clutching a candlelight that is self-deceptive and starkly transparent at the same time. Frances Chang's been thinking about co