SEVEN NOISES

Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai, originally from Taiwan, but spending most of his life in Canada, moving from Montreal to Vancouver recently. He's released some records, most of them on Fixture Records and most of them still available for download, combining melodica, guitars, drones, percussion and voice and the recurrent system of using the Lo-Fi DIY as if it was another instrument on his recordings separates this project from other obscure dark ambient bands. The songs are pretty cinematic, if you can imagine a movie using this music as background. Although sometimes it's really dark it's never too dark to be intimidating or uncomfortable. He plays with dub sounds, drones, repetition and textures mixing them to get an hypnotic, floating and original result difficult to tag. On his last release, the unnamed cassette for the prolific and interesting label Night People, Dirty Beaches has moved a huge step forward. Now percussion and rhythm are at the center of the compositions making them slightly more hypnotic and a bit less dark although the essence of his sound is still there and it's even his most Lo-Fi recording yet, and I would say he uses samples and voice in a more present way. It's definitely his best released yet and he's putting out a 7" split single with US Girls anytime soon on Sibling Sex Records, a label that according to their still not launched website it's not on the works yet.

Dirty beaches - White Sand.mp3