Baltimore’s Julien Chang has shared new single ‘Snakebit’.
The songwriter’s debut album ‘Jules’ landed back in 2019, and he took a step back over the pandemic. Follow up ‘The Sale’ occupies its own realm, a singular cosmos that interpolates several new aesthetic strands.
New single ‘Snakebit’ is out now, and it opens with lush saxophone tones, before emerging as something more refulgent, playful, and pop-oriented. Julien explains that the song “emerged during a period of transformation”, prompted by a relocation from Baltimore to New Jersey for university.
He explains: “The awkwardness of the transition and the discomfort of ‘growing pains’ provoked in me a kind of creative agitation which found its outlet most decisively in this song. But the song is not only about changing. It is also about encountering change: in a reflective turn, encountering myself who is changing and then interrogating him, testing the limits of the ‘new me’ before finding that I am really not so different.”
Musically soothing, there’s a subtle urgency to ‘Snakebit’ that traces Julien Chang’s path of identity exploration. He continues: “The song takes the form of a self-interrogation. I have changed, but how? and when? Why? This video simulates the fragmented, unfocused, and self-contradictory search for clues that one falls into trying to answer.”
“Taken as a whole, the animations all seem to go together on a single string, but examined individually, it is clear that what binds them is not any logical order. In this sense, the video has the structure of a dream. While dreaming, a rapid sequence of freely-associated images and events seems to make perfect sense. It is only upon sober reflection the following morning that these images and events become absurd, random, and nonsensical.”
Tune in now.
Photo Credit: Roxy Blocksdorf
