NOISEY 043: DIRTY BEACHES

Dirty Beaches is the highly stylized solo project of Alex Zhang Hungtai. Defined by distance, Hungtai has lived in Honolulu, Toronto, Taipei, New York, Shanghai, Montreal, and Vancouver. The project picked up in 2005 when Hungtai moved to Montreal, having been forced from Honolulu after dropping out of college. The early recordings reflect his isolation at the time, painting a portrait of a reclusive outsider obsessively crafting largely instrumental lo-fidelity drones. As his career moved forward he began to embrace the melancholy nostalgia of his father’s music, doo-wop and rockabilly of the 1950s. Badlands is his most recent release, and it pushes this melancholy to a surreal extreme. The songs are built around cyclical, early-rock beats, and the entire record evokes the wistful romanticism of film directors like Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch.

Hungtai’s career took a turn when he was tapped by Dee Dee, front woman of the girl-group connoisseurs the Dum Dum Girls, to release his material on her Zoo Music label. He joined the Dum Dum Girls for a month-long US tour in the spring of 2011. It was an apt pairing; Dirty Beaches finds a counterpoint in the recent wave of lo-fi minimalist fuzz-pop. The tour, which also featured Brooklyn new-wavers the Minks, brought Hungtai’s music to a larger audience for the first time.

We saw him at Il Motore in Montreal, the city that originally encouraged his interest in lo-fidelity recording techniques. Hungtai really shines out onstage, where he adopts the seething slow-burn of his rockabilly icons.