LOVE HURTS
THE POWER OF ONE
Alex Zhang Hungtai, aka Dirty Beaches, chats with Nick Argyriou about being naturally drawn to melancholia, escaping to Berlin and the two records he’ll release in 2013. orn in Taiwan, Alex Zhang Hungtai has made Toronto, Honolulu, Vancouver, and Montreal his homes, and now it’s Berlin where the soundscape artist will rest his head, possibly for the next year. His move there last month was fuelled by his want for a change of scenery as a result of a personal issue, he reveals. “I just ended a five-year relationship, so I just wanted to move to a different city, you know, where I don’t speak the language and kind of start new.”
He’s made legions of fans as the creative lynchpin of My Morning Jacket, but now Jim James is taking a detour on his lonesome. He tells Steve Bell about revelling in solitude and stumbling across his own individual sound.
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Since shifting to Berlin, Hungtai’s recorded two albums to deal with the hurt. There’s one instrumental, and another with vocals that integrate his trademark noir beats and fuzz that have forever attempted to emulate the mood of his idol, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Karwai. Love Is The Devil and Drifters are both due in the coming months, on the back of Dirty Beaches’ previous records Night City (2010) and Badlands (2011). With the entirety of the instrumental Love Is The Devil being written in a few weeks in December as Hungtai dealt with his private crisis, the record takes on the gloomy feel of his state of mind. As his verbatim tweet back on Thursday 3 January informed: “Just submitted ‘love is the devil’ to @zoomusic666 and the cover art as well”, before adding, “A lot of blood & tears went into this instrumental LP”. There was also the tweet the following day that continued the despair: “Was actually crying in the studio alone in Berlin. 5am. One take. #emo #pit #bottom #mellotron”. “I was having a really rough time there,” explains Hungtai, “I pretty much went cold turkey in the sense that I sold all my stuff, gave possessions away to friends and packed [for Berlin] like I was going away on tour, like really minimal. I didn’t want anyone to find me, and I just found it all cathartic.” Drifters, meanwhile, is an electronic-based album, recorded with an expanded threepiece that includes Bernardino Femminielli and Shub Roy with drum machine looping, synths, guitar and vocals logged throughout.
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“The idea of Drifters is definitely a nighttime record, and conceptually it’s a reflection of life on the road and being in different cities all the time,” says Hungtai. “Drifters has really got this sabotaging a reality kind of subtext… I don’t want to say, like, druggy,” he laughs. The word ‘hypnotic’ is offered for Hungtai to run with instead, which he does. “Yeah, it is hypnotic and is me translating all of that, which is pretty much my life of the past two years,” he confesses. It’s clear that this melancholia in the Dirty Beaches armoury has forever stemmed from a genuine place. Brutally honest and refreshingly rousing, Hungtai’s early days singing vocals in a metal band, his early morning hours spent as a video clerk in a porn store working the graveyard shift from midnight until 9am, his upbringing in Taiwan and adoration for auteurs David Lynch and the aforementioned Wong Kar-wai have all aided in sculpting the performer’s symphony. “I’m just more naturally drawn to this melancholy,” admits Hungtai. “I was in Croatia on tour recently and people would come up and say, ‘Oh, are you okay, you look really sad!’” he chuckles. But it’s an undulating wave of emotions for Hungtai. “[A lot] of times in reality [which subsequently translates into the music] I’m neither happy nor upset – more neutral.” It’s a curious balance for Hungtai, this ‘sad and beautiful world’ he subsists in, and it has to be this way otherwise the ramifications would be dire. “I’m trying to justify everything because if I don’t, then I’ll be in this really deep depression trying to make sense of my life,” he attests. WHO: Dirty Beaches WHEN & WHERE: Sunday 10 February, Tote
im James’ unmissable voice aside, his brand new album Regions Of Light And Sound Of God – his first ever solo effort – sounds nothing like the body of work that he’s crafted with his Kentucky outfit My Morning Jacket over the last decade or so. That band’s six acclaimed albums are each derivations of the country-rock template – though there’s plenty of experimentation and diversity within that canon – while this new collection is a different beast entirely, all hazy soundscapes and abstract instrumentation, a more languid and somehow intimate experience for the listener, while no less compelling.
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James explains that he wasn’t originally setting out to make his own album – and that My Morning Jacket is still very much an ongoing concern – but having set up a new studio in Kentucky, suddenly having both unfettered time and the freedom to experiment just led him organically down the solo path. Over the course of the next two years – between My Morning Jacket tours – he played basically all of the instruments on the record as well as engineering and producing it all himself. “I’ve never really had a need to [do a solo project] before, because I’ve always just been in My Morning Jacket and that’s always fulfilled my needs and my wants – and it still does – but this is kind of a different thing,” the songwriter offers. “Because in the past I was always [working on my own], but it was always demos for a My Morning Jacket record, and this time I just felt like I didn’t want to do demos anymore, I had enough songs that I just wanted to make a record. “In the band we all encourage each other to do as many different things as we can – I think that’s one of the beautiful things about being a musician or any career in life, just experimenting and finding different ways to express yourself within that. In My Morning Jacket we encourage each other to get out there
and explore what’s out there to be explored.” Once he realised that a bunch of the tracks he was working on did indeed lend themselves to a separate project, James let the songs themselves take him to the disparate realms which characterise Regions Of Light... “A lot of the songs knew what they wanted to be, but I didn’t really know how to do some of it at first, so it took quite a bit of experimenting and messing around,” he admits. “But in my mind I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted it to be. It was actually a lot of fun because it was really just me experimenting in the studio and I really didn’t put any pressure on myself to finish it by a certain date or do any of those things that normally come with making a record. I didn’t want any of that pressure so I decided to just let it take its course and take as long as it needed to take.” And distancing himself from the distinctive My Morning Jacket sound wasn’t a major ambition for the record, more a by-product of this new process. “I like playing music by myself and I like being in the studio by myself so it was kinda just born from that,” James muses. “I mean, I love being in My Morning Jacket too and I love playing in a band – they’re just kinda two different worlds. This is more the side of me that loves experimenting with sounds and playing with different instruments, and just really enjoying being a musician by myself.” WHO: Jim James WHAT: Regions Of Light And Sound Of God (Spunk/Co-Operative)