Alex Zhang Hungtai on Divorce, Jungian Psychotherapy, and the End of Dirty Beaches

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Today's installment: Alex Zhang Hungtai has been one of my favorite people to check in with over the years, I believe this is the fourth time (at least) that I've spoken to him in professional capacity over the last 13 years. He's a fearless artist and an intense conversationalist, and every single time we've got on the horn I've walked away feeling very mentally enriched. The last time I had him on the newsletter was way back in 2021, and last month we reconnected to talk about his recent spate of releases after some time away, which include the pandemic-borne Dras and the heady, exploratory improv of the just-released Orion/Mother. As it turns out, these latest missives are just the beginning of things to come, which we got into quite a bit as well. Check it out:

It's been five years since we last talked. Walk me through what's been going on in your life.
I moved from L.A. to New York with my ex-wife. [Since then] it's just been starting new and getting more involved with the improvisation scene in New York—and, obviously, the end of the marriage, which ended last year. Now, I'm in-between. I put everything in storage, and I'm going to Paris next week. I've been going there for the past couple months, then back in New York for a couple months, and then back there to play shows in Europe. The last five years has been burrowing my head in, focusing on improvisation and playing with other people.

Are you considering moving to Paris full-time? What's your mindset in general?
I'm not sure, exactly. I think it's back to drifting again. The last seven years with my ex was probably my last attempt to try to settle down.

Why is that?
I mean, I'm 45 now. Before I met her, I was like, "Is this it? I'm just going to be drifting around my whole life." Then we got married and I was like, "Okay, maybe let's give this a shot and try to settle down." It didn't work out, so now I'm back to drifting again—and I feel good about it this time. It feels like less of a curse, and more like I'm actually really grateful that I have this life.

I know that reaching the end of something can have something of a clear-eyed effect in general. It sounds like, for you, the divorce represented a point of greater realization.
Yeah, it was like, maybe I shouldn't try to change who I am, and just focus on that and don't feel bad about it. Eembrace the drifting part. I got rid of 90% of my stuff and shoved the rest into a storage unit in Bed-Stuy.

Have you ever been one for having a bunch of stuff? We've talked a lot before about how much you're constantly touring and traveling. Obviously, with that level of drifting and transience, having stuff can be much more of a burden than it usually would be.
Before I met my ex-wife, I was living out of two suitcases—just gear, music equipment, clothes, and some books. That's literally all I had. Over the past seven years, I accumulated so much stuff just from settling down, so now I'm in the process of getting rid of it all. Whatever I couldn't get rid of—sentimental stuff—I have in storage. I've acquired a lot of books in the last few years, so that was hard. But I'm back to one suitcase again. I'm wearing the same clothes for two months. I'm just wearing fucking Dickies pants and some fucking Fruit of the Loom wife-beaters.

Sometimes, as you get older, you do fall into a routine of having some sort of a uniform, just to make kind of like the act of putting on clothes being one less thing you have to think too hard about.
Yeah, I really like it actually, especially if I'm traveling, I'm just wearing the same clothes every day. I don't think about it. It's more utilitarian. I dress by the seasons, you know?

You've put out a few records recently. It's something of an explosion of activity for you after some time out of what one would refer to as the public eye.
Yeah, it's kind of an explosion. Dras was more of an endemic album that I had sitting on my hard drive for five years. Post-divorce, it motivated me into working. To my surprise, it wasn't really like an explosion of sad music. It was just a motivation of like finishing old projects. Orion/Mother was recorded and finished in two weeks—it was this explosion of creativity—and then throughout this past winter, I made another album. I hope I get to talk to you about that one, having talked to you throughout my entire career. I'm not supposed to talk about it yet, but since we've known each other for so long, this one is just electric bass and vocals. It sounds a lot like Dirty Beaches, because it was some form of—I don't want to call it a psychosis or anything, but I did lock myself in for a few months. I didn't have access to any instruments or rehearsal space, just an electric bass in my closet and my headphones and laptop. I was doing this Jungian psychotherapy exercise called active imagination, where you try to imagine a space, and then you're at that space with a shovel, and you dig deeper and deeper until the hole is big enough for you to be in there—and then you keep digging until you've reached the center of the earth, when you come across your unconscious.

That sounds pretty intense, but you've always seemed like somebody who's drawn to reflection. Given this period of transition in your life, talk to me more about the challenges when it comes to looking in the mirror of your mind, so to speak.
It's been really intense. The third album literally felt like I was revisiting my abandoned childhood home. Everything that I uncovered there was remnants of Dirty Beaches—and I understood where the persona came from, why it existed in the first place, and why I'd abandoned it. It all made sense. It was a sudden erratic behavior, but I ended the band because it no longer made me happy. It was just like making me miserable. But I never really understood why I ended it, and this was like an attempt to give this character a final resting ground, sent off into the distance.

This intense period has just been kind of...I don't know how to articulate it. It's this intense forging of the will—a trial of the self, tests of your will, and deceit, and disappointments. Just life in general. Things that could make things difficult, financial worries and whatever, things start to pile up. I think of it like metal being pounded over and over again, until your will becomes unbreakable and it turns into something else, like being forged. It's a very intense process.

Do you see a therapist while you're going through this process, or is it working stuff out on your own?
I unfortunately cannot afford therapy. I did two sessions, and they were $200 each. After two sessions I was like, "You know what? I think I'm good." Things don't hurt anymore. I feel like my bank account hurts more.

You've mentioned this next record being this moment where you're putting your history with Dirty Beaches to bed. Is it going to be released under the Dirty Beaches name?
It's gonna be released under my own name, because I don't want to bring up any hopes of people thinking I'm going to bring that project back. Even just last night, someone came up to me and was like, "Are you Dirty Beaches?" And I was like, "No, I'm not Dirty Beaches. I'm Alex. Nice to meet you." I've been getting a lot of this over the past decade with really young kids, and it's always a mindfuck. I don't think they even bother reading up, because every time they come up to me they have no idea that the project ended in 2014. They're like, "Oh, I thought it's still ongoing."

There is this funny trade-off with younger listeners these days. They're extremely adventurous, but but the contextual knowledge does seem harder to come by these days.
I think it's because Dirty Beaches has, survived in some playlists and has gotten regurgitated through AI-generated algorithms. It's bizarre, because they have no context. They're just like, "Cool song."

The last time we talked, you said that the Dirty Beaches records made you cringe. It does sound like, with this new record on the horizon, you feel differently now.
For sure. It's especially helped me to not attack myself. That severe self-criticism comes from not understanding the roles of persona, in the Jungian psychology sense. It's a part of me that I rejected—a phase of my life—because of living irresponsibly, pursuing hedonistic lifestyles, and making life choices that I wouldn't necessarily agree with now. But it was a crucial coming-of-age process, and I feel very lucky that I was able to resolve my family trauma through Dirty Beaches. It helped me like surpass my father's shadow, ironically, by becoming him in some metaphoric way—by honoring his childhood dream that he couldn't realize. He loved Elvis Presley, and he wanted to be a musician—but that dream of his only lasted one summer, when he was 16. It was a subconscious attempt to non-verbally to engage with my father in some way, because our relationship was really bad up until he passed. Badlands was my attempt to reach out to him in some way.

Over the past decade, I also got really into Alejandro Jodorowsky's films and his book on psychomagic, which is this theatrical performance art that he developed by combining psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, witchcraft, and everything else he picked up along the way—self-hypnosis into addressing deep traumatic wounds that happened in your lifetime. For Jodorowsky, it was his father never recognizing him as an artist and calling him a maricón for being into poetry. He left Chile when he was 16, and he never saw his father again. It was so intense for him, making all these movies about the father and the mother. Even into old age, his movies were still talking about his father. In The Dance of Reality, he had his grandson play him and his own sons play his father and the younger version of himself. It was a complete family affair.

As you continue to dig deeper and in different directions, do you find yourself sometimes instinctively wanting to pull back?
Yeah. It's funny, because that part of my childhood is so hard to process that it had to be processed through Dirty Beaches, or some kind of a persona. I wish I could just make an emo—what was that guy's name? Dashboard Confessionals or something? I wish I could just pick up an acoustic guitar and write songs like Elliott Smith, but I can't. It's too much for me. I have to create some kind of a fictional landscape and code it, and it's so heavily coded so that no one knows what the hell I'm talking about except me. I pour in all these emotions in there, and it alleviates the pain.

This third album really hit a nerve for me, because I thought that, through the divorce, I'd processed a lot of what I needed to process. After Dras and Orion/Mother, I thought, "Okay, I got it out of my system." But then this third one came out of nowhere, and it was telling me that abstract instrumental jazz was not sufficient enough to address this deep psychic wound.

You mentioned earlier getting deeper into the improv scene in New York. Talk to me about what the role of collaboration and working with others is doing for you versus this more personal, intense, introspective direction you sometimes go in.
The improv world is so big and diverse. One of the things I love about improvisation is that I sincerely believe we play how we live. There's nowhere to hide. There are people who are amazing—very loving people, team players—and people who are emotionally avoidant, who talk over other people, who don't give space for other people or respect other people's boundaries. They all come through when you play together. All these parts of yourselves are exposed through this non-verbal expression, which is really bizarre. It's such a wide network of so many different people in New York City, and it's intergenerational and intersectional. The intersections of electronics, noise, and free jazz is what I'm interested in the most. I love that little intersection in New York City, because that's where all my friends are. I don't belong in the academic jazz world, the avant-garde composers' realm, harsh noise scenes, techno-geek gearhead worlds. I'm always using the cheapest shit I can find. But the intersection is where I belong, and it's been so great to make friends with people who are also in that intersection.

When it comes to working with others, how long does it take for you to suss out whether or not it's going to be a good fit?
You know right away, because it's developed based on friendship and an emotional connection. If you don't have an emotional connection with someone, it's not really worth exploring.

Last time around, we talked a little bit about getting into score work. Is that something you're still doing at this point?
Yeah, I'm still doing it. I'm talking to a Chinese-Canadian director right now about their upcoming feature. I'm just very picky about this kind of stuff. It also doesn't come as frequent as I like, because I don't have an agent.

Whenever there's a soundtrack job, it comes directly from the director 99% of the time. Sometimes it's rough, because I'm a team player when it comes to movie soundtracks, and I converse with the directors heavily and try to understand what they need. I want to serve a purpose, to make the film better—no ego on my part. Unfortunately, there's a lot of directors who don't know what they want, so that makes the working experience very unpleasant. They're just like, "Can you make something dark and sinister, but with hope?" You're like, "Uh, sure." You give it a shot and send it to them, and they're like, "It's a bit too dark. Can you make it like they're discovering some hope in the end of the tunnel on a cold day?" You do it, send it back, and they're like, "Now it's a little bit too bright and warm." Then, after seven tries, they're like, "You know what? I think the first one was the best one." It's a waste of your time, so you have to really protect yourself and what kind of directors you get involved with.

At the end of the day, you have to really respect the director's work, and if it's someone that you see eye-to-eye with creatively, then that's the best, because you feel like you're working together as a team, trying to sail this project to the final goal. Ultimately the director is kind of like a captain—but what if you have a fucking incompetent captain? You're like, "Alright, Captain, where are we going today?" And he's like, "You figure it out." You're like, "OK, should we go this way? And he's like, "No, that's not where we're going." So then you're like, "I thought you didn't know." They don't know what they want, but they always know what they don't want.

I was taking a look at your IMDb. You've done some work as an actor.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

Talk to me a little bit about getting into that. Does that require a different creative mindset for you in terms of skillset?
Ever since i got into improvisation over the past decade, I've thought of acting as another form of improvisation—and it relates back to how I approach improvisation. I can't play traditional jazz, I can't play composed music, so I have to be in this very small intersection of where I belong. It's the same with acting. I can only work with directors that know how to use me—to give me enough freedom and space to explore characters and expand on the dialogue. If you just want me to read the lines...I'm a non-professional, untrained actor. It's gonna suck. Reading it directly off the script, I don't know how to internalize that. I didn't go to school for it. But if you give me the freedom to change the text into my own words so I can embody some kind of personal experience behind it, then it's highly rewarding for me and the director.

When it comes to film, what have you seen recently that you've liked or disliked?
There's one film that blew me away that I saw last year: Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides.

Oh yeah, I loved that one.
It's one of my all-time favorite movies now, up there with Paris, Texas. It's remarkable. A buddy of mine was like, "Yo, check out this movie. It's so fucking good." I rented it and put it on, and it just fucking blew me away. I had zero contex—I didn't know what the movie was about, I just knew that Jia Zhangke is a fucking master and that it was probably worth watching. 20 years, what he does with all that—it's really crazy. At first I was like, "That's that actress that's his wife in real life." And then you watch as she gets older, the background is changing, and China's changed. It emotionally hit me like a ton of bricks. The way they narrated the film like karaoke lyrics in the beginning, all these very poetic moments—I was really floored.