I would imagine that one would either have built-in receptors for these sounds or not. For the former, the music this individual has crafted does things to your psychic landscape...that really nothing else can. When I'm undertaking a day of Dirty Beaches listening (it feels cheap to do anything less than), open up my brain and you're in post-apocalyptic death valley where theres an albino wild horse problem, flash tornadoes, avocado trees with fruit the size of melons, re-populated ghost towns, blissedout sock-hops that last weeks...and david lynch is the gatekeeper (funny, I read
this just after writing that. it's one of the best interviews I've read). Alex Zhang-Hungtai is a showman, a postmodern alchemist. He is uniquely, refreshingly divulging and honest about his creative process (like a gleaner, something we are all so weirdly good at now) and personal histories (transiency) shaping his music. Reading his
phenomenal blog and
various interviews have me behaving like a hungry puppy. Is there really so little of this level of wisdom, poeticisms and absence of jadedness in the young music world these days that comments he has made (
"I wanted to create an abstract narrative about someone that's been possessed by the road" or
"Friends are your family when you’re a stranger in a new town") made me sigh with something like pleasurelief, loudly, in public? I love that people writing about Dirty Beaches and the man himself have described his music as 'filmic' and 'restless'. It is so visual, and the images are marked with
wildness and movement. I think a lot about what's going on within the neuroses of the little micro-generation I am part of (hello, thesis!), and though it remains difficult to articulate,
Badlands could easily be its soundtrack. Certainly a junction of many media arts–just the fact that I trust this person to have come to creation with a weight of study, cultural reference and joy is so precious, when so many folks seem to be getting away with just fuckingaround (and no harm in that).
Dirty Beaches is #1. See it for yourself on
tour.
