“An ideal entry point to a double album which layers a variety of instruments, an ensemble of collaborators and indeed an array of time periods over one another, recombining a patchwork of past and present to conjure something entirely new.” That’s how we described ‘Mother’ and ‘Sidewinder, the first two singles from Alex Zhang Hungtai‘s new album Orion/Mother, forthcoming next month via American Dreams. The record sees the Taiwanese-Canadian artist build upon the structural improvisation methods of Butch Morris, Zhang recording with a number of musicians (including percussionist Che Chen, Korean gong resonator/experimentalist Leo Chang, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, flautist Laura Cox, cellist Lester St. Louis, noise artist Kwami Winfield and tap dancer Melissa Almaguer) before using software to cut up the sessions and weave the constituent parts into a novel whole. An album which rises from silence into something startling. The sound, to paraphrase Zhang himself, of a dormant thing starting to awaken.
With the release of Orion/Mother fast approaching, Alex Zhang Hungtai has returned with another single. ‘American Burial’ takes inspiration from Tobe Hooper’s 1982 classic Poltergeist, both in terms of the film’s narrative and the wider circumstances of its filming. “[The movie is] about a white family moving into a newly purchased home but the house was haunted because it was built on ‘Indian burial ground’,” Zhang explains. “Trivia: the skeleton corpses that float up from the muddy waters were real corpses cuz it was cheaper to buy unclaimed bodies than to build from scratch multiple skeletons. Hollywood logic! The actors did not know it was real. But perhaps all of us come to this land to bury something, consciously or not. Buildings burn, people die, and new buildings are built over it as if nothing ever happened.”
The image is a fitting one for a release concerned with the ways the past exists within the present, fragments perpetually returning no matter how deep they have been interred beneath the earth. But while other artists might get caught up with this excavation, or else put their energies into covering over the skeletons before they make themselves at home in our lives, Alex Zhang Hungtai aims to do something different. Welcome the past into the present, but not without purpose. Because that which has gone can be broken down and repurposed. From the scraps of the past, a new life might rise.
Photo by Nastya Bezrukova