The return of this old companion of experiences in this city, of another Lisbon, where he lived, made friends and raised a family during a relatively brief spell that nevertheless left its mark on his journey and which, in his nomadic travels since then, has served as a stopping-off point for occasional visits. This time, his appearance comes at a particularly prolific time for the Taiwanese-born musician, with two albums already released this year: Dras on Shelter Press and the double album Orion/Mother on American Dreams. Distinct in their origins and outcomes, they reveal, in their uniqueness, two complementary facets of the identity and visions that Hungtai has been projecting under his own name since shedding the Dirty Beaches moniker, across solo albums, collaborative records and soundtrack compositions: the solitary revelation in Dras and the creative communion in Orion/Mother.
Capturing the blissful reverberations of the Saint Joseph Oratory in Montreal in 2019, Dras draws on the clamour of the saxophone as the primary source for compositions born from these recordings and patiently crafted in the solitude of the 2020 pandemic. Exploring the resonances and harmonics of the basilica’s spatial immensity, Hungtai engages in a dialogue with these spectral apparitions amidst seemingly dissonant melodies, aching chords and subterranean passages that act as an inner mirror of this enveloping space, and vice versa. Envisioning a sort of band drawn from various improvisations with musicians such as Kwami Winfield and Laura Cocks—recorded over previous years and revisited during a particularly harsh winter in New York—Orion/Mother spans two discs, making it his most expansive work to date. Inspired by Butch Morris’s method of improvisation, Hungtai arranged a series of recording sessions, featuring percussion, electronics, vocals and wind instruments, in pieces composed across different eras, over which he himself improvised clarinet lines—as attuned to melancholic sorrow as to timbral exploration—in a whole that mysteriously hovers between a certain intangibility and an almost palpable, living sonic quality. Such is the nature of this restless spirit.
BS
