Just skipping song stones down the river. Spontaneous and surreal, kooky, sometimes old-fashioned, spiritual, and haunting.

Verses Records, www.versesrecords.com,  is a Washington, DC based label focused on experimental, electronic and neoclassical music.  You can check out the entire roster and support the label at the Bandcamp link.  Please make press/media and all other inquiries via our website.

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.

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.

属 Belonging is set for digital release April 24th, 2020 and physical release May 29th, 2020 via City Slang, with the new singles "Audacious" featuring Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead and "舞狮 Lion Dance" out now.

- Written by Ross Edwards

From the start, Son Lux has operated as something akin to a sonic test kitchen. The Academy Award® and BAFTA-nominated band 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 Chang and Rafiq Bhatia too strong to ignore. The trio 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 scored A24’s Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once for which they were nominated for two Academy Awards and a BAFTA. The full score album features new collaborations with Mitski, David Byrne, Randy Newman, and Moses Sumney, among others.

a taste of unreleased works from some years ago

Raven Bauer Durham is following