New York–based Taiwanese-Canadian artist, musician, and actor Alex Zhang Hungtai has shared American Burial, the latest single from his forthcoming double album, Orion/Mother, due out June 19th, 2026 via American Dreams.
Inspired by Butch Morris’ conduction method of directing improvisation, Zhang revisited recordings made with a range of New York improvisers and reshaped them into a new collaborative work. Using Ableton to splice and merge sessions, he assembled an ad hoc ensemble featuring 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.
Reflecting on American Burial in hindsight, Zhang recalls the movie Poltergeist from the 80’s: "It's about a white family moving into a newly purchased home but the house was haunted because it was built on “Indian burial ground.” (Trivia: the skeleton corpses that float up from the muddy waters were real corpses cuz it was cheaper to buy unclaimed bodies than to build from scratch multiple skeletons. Hollywood logic! The actors did not know it was real). But perhaps all of us come to this land to bury something, consciously or not. Buildings burn, people die, and new buildings are built over it as if nothing ever happened."
The track continues Zhang’s exploration of unresolved fragments from his past, distilling them into something immediate and transformative as he integrates memory into the present and charts a new path forward.
“The major contributor to the completion of this double album,” Zhang says, “is the removal of doubt.”
ZR