Tagged with " Dustin Wong"
Takako Minekawa & Dustin Wong – “Party on a Floating Cake” (Official Video)
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The collaboration between Japanese artisan Takako Minekawa and Chinese/American craftsman Dustin Wong is surprising, and at the same time, not surprising at all. It’s something like the pleasure of seeing someone you dream to see at a party, now and again emerging as a dash of color in an open window, again at the top of a set of curved stairs, then slipping into an ambiguous car. Minekawa and Wong come together to create an album of this true magic, Tropical Circle.
The co-directed video for “Party on a Floating Cake” illustrates it best. Colors dart in and out faster than the blink of an eye, about and around in blur and focus. It is tenderly abstract and delicately minimal. It is a floating carnival, shrunk under the shadow of a tree—exuberant and tiny.
The 13-track Tropical Circle will be released via PLANCHA May 15th.
Flamingods – “Quesso”
UK label Art Is Hard records is viewed by its peers as way ahead of the game, launching the careers of Splashh, Bos Angeles and others exciting lo-fi projects a whim, through releases via. a pizza box and other such novel methods, none of which border on gimmicky territory. They’ve spent the past 14 releases honing their craft and getting used to the ins and outs of running such a DIY project, but yesterday they announced a new venture: the album release.
Surely their chosen buddy for such a big bold move had to be one hell of a band, right? Right. Flamingods. They come from London but their sound is so steeped in adventure and life and exploration that if you’d told be they’d just been picked out amongst a bunch of Amazonian tribes, I’d probably believe you.
“Quesso”, the taster track of the 2013 debut Sun, has Ponytail‘s Dustin Wong on guitar, if ever you needed another reason to fall hopelessly in love with this band. It is bursting with the kind of giddy enthusiasm that only little kids have when they’re out trick or treating.
HUME – “PHASING” (Official Video)
That lucid, dreamy feeling of being submerged in deep blue water, the tides controlling your every movement, thought, and feeling.
The video for HUME‘s atmospheric psych pop jam, “Phasing”, evokes very strong feelings about my earliest memories of swimming and how the experience can be very surreal—almost feeling like you’ve entered a whole new dimension.
The video sees frontman Britton Powell drifting through the aquatic haze, observing the formation of animated shapes and sweet, underwater ballet session. It’s really gorgeous and the vocals have this mesmeric nature to them that makes the whole visual piece feel like one big, fantasy swim meet.
HUME will be dropping the Phasing EP sometime this Fall, which features remixes by Dustin Wong, Doldrums, and Glass Window (Protect-U). Prep your goggles and prepare to dive into some more weird goodness from these guys soon.
Dustin Wong – ‘Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads’
Dustin Wong is a Baltimore musician making music unlike any I’ve ever heard. His tools mainly consist of an electric guitar and a series of pedals. The output is large and vast…but larger and vaster than anything you could ever dream of. Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads was released yesterday via Thrill Jockey and it floored me. Knocked me out. When this whole PORTALS-thang came about, I knew I wanted to write something about it…but I blanked. I’m still kind of blanked. It’s layered, textured, intricate, impressive, and largely recorded live, but you can read all those great facts via Thrill Jockey. So what is my take on Dreams Say, View…?
After numerous deleted Word files and such…
It reminds me of trees.
Yes.
I’m a painter…sometimes…and I like painting trees especially. Over the last few weekends I have been painting a large mural of a tree in a Baltimore public school and I’ve been listening to Dustin Wong. While staring at this monstrous orange tree I started thinking that there was a connection.
Take a look out the window and find a mature tree. It’s beautiful, right? Solid and structured. Look closer at all of the limbs and branches splitting and twisting and wrapping and bending…swaying in the wind. It’s chaotic. My eyes shift focus constantly when looking into the branches of a tree.
Now think of this tree growing over time. Each season, each wind gust, each rain fall guiding the growth of the tree. So while chaotic in result, the mass amount of limbs and branches methodically grew that way because of the life/world around it.
And in the end the tree…from afar…is together and solid and beautiful.
This is Dustin Wong‘s music to me. A guitar melody building and growing, spiraling, and shifting, becoming denser and more complicated by the second. Until it peaks and towers and awes. My ears shift focus constantly and are constantly rewarded for doing so.
So that’s it. Go get this album. Listen to a tree.
All this week Dustin Wong is posting “Dream” songs on his SoundCloud to help celebrate the release of the album. He asked fans and friends to record themselves talking about specific dreams and send it to him. The result is DW soundtracking these dreams as they are spoken. Here’s “Dave Sutton’s Dream”:
Dustin Wong is playing what is sure to be a mind blowing event here in Baltimore at Soft House on Saturday and Sunday. More info on that here. Just to give you an idea of why you need to do what ever you can to get to a Dustin Wong show:
And some more videos from the LP:
