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Abandon
Alex Chang
Label: Adhyâropa Records
Released: 2026
Duration: 00:40:00
Views: 157
Tracks
Rain (from Water Suite in C# Minor); A Love As Deep (I); Falling Jam (Swirling Leaves); Caress (I); Rain (from Water Suite in C# Minor) - Trio; Abandon; Caress (II); Suite in C, Mvt. II; Rain (from Water Suite in C# Minor); Leaving; A Love As Deep (II)
Personnel
Album Description
Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce Abandon (ÂR00185), the gorgeous new album by the sonically adventurous harp virtuoso Alex Chang. Using effects, multi-tracking, and looping, Chang charts 11 sonic tapestries in solo, duo, and trio formats, all with her extraordinary harp at the center.
Chang is, along with Brandee Younger, Maeve Gilchrist, and Edmar Castañeda, among the generation of harpists exploring the remarkable landscape of sonic possibilities of her instrument. Branching off from its classical roots, Chang has found herself steering the harp through jazz, folk, and rock textures, all with improvisation at its core. She is also active as an interdisciplinary collaborator and impresario in the arts community of the Capital Region, New York State, focusing on environmental themes and centering BIPOC artists. She leads The Rock City Falls Trio, a post-genre ensemble (featured on track 3, ‘Falling Jam (Swirling Leaves),’ on this recording) that focuses on collective improvisation with artists across many different disciplines. She teaches at Rutgers University as an Associate Professor of Practice at the Arts, Culture and Media Department, and was the recipient of the 2025 Art Connects Artist Grant.
Her current project Abandon takes the form of two love stories. One navigates the sometimes painful, at times ecstatic landscape of love itself. It’s the soundtrack to the most universal of human experiences, in all of its joys and sorrows, the profundity of both its ecstasies and sorrows. But it is also a paean to Chang’s other great love, improvisation and spontaneous creativity. Creating a sonic wall of sound with both acoustic concert harp and amplified, modulated electric harp, Chang creates conversations with herself as well as with her collaborators full of the cohesion of chamber music and the unbridled whimsy of jazz.
“Abandon is a very intimate kind of album, and it's meant to be sat with and listened through from beginning to end,” Chang says. “There are little Easter eggs throughout, like the solo, duo, and trio versions of ‘Rain’ sprinkled throughout. And I foreshadow the appearance of those themes, interwoven with the improvisations. It’s not a listening experience that arcs like a parabola; it’s episodic, an undulating landscape. When ‘A Love As Deep’ returns at the end, it communicates closure, moving on from a love that didn’t work out.”
An instructive view into Chang’s approach can be found by comparing the three different takes on her composition ‘Rain (from Water Suite in C# Minor),’ in solo, trio, and duo formats. The album opening solo version is a ruminative, multitracked dialogue between Chang and herself, all shades of sunshower and grey, contrapuntal raindrops of shimmering harp sound. The mid-album trio version, which begins with a jabbing bowed bass by Jason Handron before making room for the surprise of Adam Forman’s cymbals, is in a considerably more experimental, Free Jazz/New Music soundworld, more akin to Ornette Coleman than Ólafur Arnalds. Finally, the late-album duo version returns to darker waters, as Chang and Forman gradually swirl the music around themselves before disappearing in a retiring shimmer. “The water understands Civilization well,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ill used, it will destroy / In perfect time and measure / With a face of golden pleasure / Elegantly destroy.”
“I like a listening experience that uses interesting transitions and juxtapositions, and I tried to use them to help shape this album,” Chang says. “I’m thinking specifically of albums like The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Check Your Head by The Beastie Boys. I wanted to, as seamlessly as possible, weave a theme throughout the album so that each time you hear it, you realize how the music and listener have both been transformed along the way.”
Improvisation is the through-line of the album. “Dorothy Ashby is a huge influence on me – I mean, come on, she’s an influence on all improvising harpists that came after her.” That influence is particularly felt in the 2nd single and album closer, ‘A Love As Deep.’ Once more orchestrating with combined electric and acoustic harp sounds, Chang creates a lustrous blanket of sound full of silvery reverb. It’s the perfect soundtrack for a rainy day, or a memory of a love lost.
“I love the Miyazaki film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which the last survivors of an ecocide struggle to save the water underneath their caverns so that nature can renew, and I’d had it on my mind a lot while creating the Water Suite that ‘Rain’ is derived from,” Chang says. “The whole idea of a love as deep as the one that film imparts informs and threads every note of this project, and I hope that comes across.”
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