Alex Zhang Hungtai has announced ‘Orion/Mother’, a new double album due June 19 on American Dreams, and he’s sharing two lead singles today to mark the occasion. “Sidewinder,” the opener from ‘Orion’, and the title track from ‘Mother’ are both out now, each exploring what Zhang describes as “the primordial state within the unconscious that leads to a confrontation with what is unspoken and hidden.”
The New York-based Taiwanese-Canadian artist, musician, and actor built the project by revisiting home recordings made with some of the city’s finest improvisers, then composing over them using Ableton to cut and match sessions together. The collaborators include percussionist Che Chen, Korean gong resonator and experimentalist Leo Chang, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, flautist Laura Cox, cellist Lester St. Louis, noise artist Kwami Winfield, and tap dancer Melissa Almaguer.
Zhang improvised on trumpet over live samples of those chopped sessions, with the instrument becoming, in his words, the “grounding force” and conceptual narrator of the entire record. The whole thing was written and recorded over two intensive weeks at a New York rehearsal space during a period of personal transition. “The major contributor to the completion of this double album,” he says, “is the removal of doubt.”
The music moves across a striking range of terrain, trumpet flying above thrumming electronics, navigating percussion strikes, communing with explosive sounds, and dissolving into silence. It’s the sound of an artist pulling unresolved fragments from his past into the present and building something entirely new from them. “The music,” Zhang says, “sounds like something that was dormant is starting to awaken.”
Zhang has spent years working outside easy categorization, releasing solo piano records, improvised music, and sound collage work since retiring his Dirty Beaches moniker in 2016. His parallel career as an actor and film scorer has taken him from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return to composing the soundtrack for Hlynur Pálmason’s acclaimed Godland. ‘Orion/Mother’ is his second project of 2026 and one of the year’s most compelling releases.
‘Orion/Mother’ Tracklist:
Orion
01 “Sidewinder”
02 “Nataraja”
03 “Shadow Integration”
04 “Orion”
05 “Tannhauser Gate”
Mother
01 “Kali”
02 “Mother”
03 “Earth Orbit”
04 “American Burial”
05 “Tuğçe”