Almost a decade after Alex Zhang Hungtai (then still under the Dirty Beaches-Banner) Graz last graced, the cosmopolitan visits the Mur metropolis again – this time in a context that one had already wished for in 2013.
Namely within the framework of Elevate Festivals. Which is even more fitting today than it was the year before the end of Dirty Beaches would have been the case. In the past decade, beyond his former band alias, Zhang Hungtai has finally developed a veritable reputation as a free-spirited experimental musician, as an ambient sound painter and mental cinema avant-gardist, who at most in Twin Peaks could settle down, and who has long since left behind the stylistic and structural conventions of music creation.
30 minutes in the mausoleum of Emperor Ferdinand II next to Graz Cathedral (what an impressive choice of location, by the way, for which you once again have to take your imaginary hat off to the organizers – even if the low temperatures in the sacred building, which is wonderfully sound-engineered makes it a little more noticeable) deliver, without being tied to song formats, a testimony that slowly gets going at first, but is then kept too short, of these circumstances rooted in instinct and improvisation.
After an emphatically unhurried beginning, during which Zhang Hungtai prepares his saxophone in a downright devout manner, after he has taken in the space with appreciative calm, for a long time he elicits only a few, sporadic tones from the instrument for an ambient collage of isolated sound islands, in where the moments of pauses often seem more elementary than the use of sound.
Only after the vibrations from the movement of the saxophone threaten after a good third of the performance like the rumbling memory of a creature awakening from the depths, a quiet rhythmic loop is at best imaginable, do the tonal gaps begin to close and will subsequently expand to the drone -Increasing the cacophony of howling frequencies and sketchy feedback before the finale brakes forgiving, but also a bit too abruptly after the climax (like everything here remains fragmentary).
Above all, however, the (against the background of a psychedelic circles drawing, rarely with the striking Elevatelight lines that are brightened visual anti-show) in an astonishingly entertaining way meandering humanoid installation over long stretches almost a minimalistic expressive dance reduced to ascetically voluptuous movements, when Zhang Hungtai with the lifted up, through circles around his head, the sounds out of the movement generating wind instrument – which again and again does not function as a wind instrument in the true sense! – turns the physical act into a patient resonator and delivers a hypnotically slow-motion performance that one would like to experience again soon, especially in the compactness so typical of the 43-year-old; and hopefully not in 10 years.
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