Alex Zhang Hungtai - Orion/Mother Vinyl 2LP

Alex Zhang Hungtai's new double album Orion/Mother, a brave, gigantic burst of life, creativity, and abstract balladry, alchemizes the past and the present, sampling home recordings he made with some of New York’s finest improvisers while spontaneously composing on top of them with trumpet and other instruments. It’s the sound of an artist addressing unresolved fragments from his past, integrating them into the present, and building a new path.

“The major contributor to the completion of this double album,” Zhang says, “is the removal of doubt.” For two weeks, during a period of intense personal transition, Zhang wrote and recorded at a rehearsal space, working regimented, full days in the dead of a long brutal New York winter. Inspired by Butch Morris’ method of directing improvisation called conduction, Zhang revisited rehearsal recordings he’d made years before with various New York improvising musicians. He created an ad-hoc group - including percussionist Che Chen, Korean Gong resonator experimentalist Leo Chang, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, flautist Laura Cox, cellist Lester St. Louis, noise artist Kwami Winfield, and tap dancer Melissa Almaguer - using Ableton to cut and match all the different sessions together. Zhang improvised with trumpet over live samples of the chopped sessions, bringing these past recordings to the present moment. You can hear overlapping snippets of his saxophone, drums and voice experimentations from the rehearsal recordings via sampling, whilst the trumpet had then become the “grounding force” and conceptual narrator of Orion/Mother, allowing Zhang to decontextualize, process, and reconcile with the past through abstract lyricism in the present.

As Orion/Mother unfolds, Zhang’s trumpet flies above thrumming electronics (“Earth Orbit”), navigates percussion strikes (“Mother”), communes with explosive sounds (“Sidewinder”), or melts into silence (“Tannhäuser Gate”). Just as Zhang uncovered the album’s scope over those two weeks in New York, the album communicates discovery, friendship, community, and attunement. “The music,” he says, “sounds like something that was dormant is starting to awaken.” Here, indeed, is a new being, a new approach to making music, and a new music itself, borne of ingenuity and attention.