This Friday, Taiwanese-Canadian songwriter, actor, and filmmaker Alex Zhang Hungtai will release his bold double album Orion/Mother—a winding, spiritual journey with Hungtai’s ominous trumpet as our guide. Featuring contributions from several fellow improvisational figures, who provide backing woodwinds, percussion, and even tap dancing, the sprawling collection remains centered around its visionary creator and the eerie sensibilities he previously channeled into Dirty Beaches and even the Twin Peaks universe.
Landing ahead of the project’s June 19 release via American Dreams, Hungtai is sharing the final track from both sides of the record today—“Tanhauser Gate” and “Tuğçe”—via a short film titled At the River Styx that he notes is something of a sequel to the film he made for the opening track from 2018’s Divine Weight, “Pierrot.” The first half sees the artist in the middle of the LA River calmly completing some form of ritual, while the second sees him engaging in a Sisyphean struggle to climb up the river’s concrete banks. The whole thing plays like a shorter, less black-metal Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, while its unsettling sense of repetition brings to mind the experimental videos of Patrick Bokanowski.
“Over the past decade, the LA River has served as an important psychic terrain where I process a lot of unacknowledged grief,” Hungtai shares. “When you scream under the bridge, it’s just your own voice echoing back; it dissipates into the vast concrete landscape, the single river stream continues regardless.” Continuing on, he cites another filmmaking reference point: “In the traditional sense of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘psycho magic,’ the act continues and serves as a blindspot where the ego cannot interfere with the unconscious so it can safely project into a reflection in hopes of integrating one-by-one all the severed selves from within. The unconscious content must travel from the depths of our psyche in order to bring forth the right environment for the conscious mind to observe that content without any prejudice or self-hatred. To initiate and negotiate, to bend or mend what was previously wounded, warped, or distorted from childhood. One piece at a time.”
Check out the short film below, and pre-order Orion/Mother here.
