music
On 1st November 2014, at gnration, Alex Zhang Hungtai gave his last concert as Dirty Beaches, a character created by himself and whose music navigates territories as distinct as instrumental drones, music for cinema, and a fascination for dissecting North American popular music, from blues to rockabilly, as well as soul and hip-hop, to the point of making it unrecognizable. The concert would serve as a presentation of Stateless, the project’s fourth and new album, which would see the light of day that same month, composed and recorded in Lisbon, the city he had adopted as his place of residence.
Days before that concert, on his now-defunct Twitter account, Alex announced the end of the project with which he offered the world a series of fresh records – Badlands (2010) being a highlight – that had attracted the attention of specialised critics. Luckily for Braga’s audience, Alex was still committed to another concert, one week later, as Dirty Beaches. Created in a context of artistic residency he brought his usual collaborator Shub Roy and the Portuguese André Gonçalves. Isolation / Focus / Meditation was still in the studio to be recorded, but it would never be edited. At the time, we wrote that Zhang Hungtai “has continuously proved to be a restless and multifaceted artist, capable of disorienting us with recurrent approaches to less obvious terrains”. Little or nothing will have changed since then. Alex has continued to explore, from improvised music to free jazz, focusing as a composer with pieces on saxophone, synthesizer, percussion, and piano. In addition to his solo work, composing for film and even acting, he has built an outstanding trio with David Maranha and Gabriel Ferrandini. Now, the Taiwanese-origin musician returns to solo concerts, on piano and saxophone, opening horizons for a future new beach.
