Alex Zhang Hungtai ⟡ Belaflor

Other 14€

Thursday 15 October · 21:00

Alex Zhang Hungtai returns to Belaflor to present two albums released this year: “Dras”, built from saxophone recordings in a Montreal basilica, and the collaborative double album “Orion/Mother”. A concert spanning solo revelation and creative communion.

Return of this old companion of experiences in this city, from another Lisbon, where he lived, befriended and created during a relatively brief passage that left a mark on his path and which, in his nomadic trajectory ever since, has been a stopping point for occasional visits. This time, the appearance takes place at a very prolific moment for the Taiwanese-born musician, with two albums already released this year: Dras on Shelter Press and the double Orion/Mother on American Dreams. Distinct in their genesis and result, in their singularity they reveal two complementary facets of the identity and visions that Hungtai has been projecting under his own name after dropping the Dirty Beaches veil, among solo albums, collaborative records and soundtrack composition: the solitary revelation in Dras and the creative communion in Orion/Mother. Capturing the beatific reverberations of Saint Joseph Oratory in Montreal in 2019, Dras has in the cry of the saxophone the primordial source for compositions born from those recordings and worked with patience in the solitude of the 2020 pandemic period. Exploring the resonances and harmonics of the basilica's spatial immensity, Hungtai dialogues with those spectral apparitions amid seemingly dissonant melodies, dorian chords and subterranean passages that are like an inner mirror of that environment, and vice versa. Imagining a kind of band from various improvisations with musicians such as Kwami Winfield or Laura Cocks recorded over previous years, revisited during a particularly harsh winter in New York, Orion/Mother stretches across two records, in what is his most expansive volume to date. Inspired by Butch Morris's improvisation method, Hungtai lined up different recording sessions, populated by percussion, electronics, voices or winds, in pieces composed from different eras, over which he himself improvised clarinet lines, as devoted to ballad-like sorrow as to timbral exploration, in a whole that mysteriously sustains itself between a certain intangibility and an almost palpable, living sonic quality. Nature of this restless spirit. BS.