To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on August, 4th, 2023. CD packaged in a mini LP jacket. C40 – black cassette with pink imprints. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.
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LA-based composer/producer/guitarist Dustin Wong returns to Hausu Mountain with Perpetual Morphosis, his second release in the catalog following Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu (HAUSMO79, 2018). Wong came to prominence nearly two decades ago as a guitarist of beloved psych-indie rock band Ponytail. He then progressed through a deep catalog of releases under his own name that includes a trilogy of solo LPs on Chicago label Thrill Jockey, who also issued three albums from his duo with Takako Minekawa (a luminary of Japanese pop and experimental music since the mid-90s). Like Fluid World Building before it, Perpetual Morphosis presents a hybridized vision in which Wong’s previously long-held practice focused on live-looped guitar sessions is simply one element in his all-encompassing electronic productions. The album finds him further developing his affinities for digital instrumentation and complex sound design, all while positioning himself as the guitarist and vocalist at the heart of his multi-layered performances.
As Dustin Wong combines his ongoing exploration of the realms of electronic production with his decades-long practice as a hands-on-guitar performer, his output conveys a sense of limitless possibility in terms of compositional density, diversity of tone, and atmospheric sophistication. Having the full palette of digital production tactics at his fingertips enables him to pursue ideas with the confidence to illuminate the lavish mosaics that appear in his mind, without ever losing sight of the human core at the center of his work. Mallet-like percussion voices swirl around electronic drum patterns, building into thick fields of sound carried over cyclical rhythmic flourishes and head-nodding beat structures. Within any given bar of the album’s compositions, you might encounter rushes of fine-grain synthesis that collude with Wong’s subtly effected, wordless vocal takes just as easily as you might find interludes in which the crisp chime of his Telecaster rings out over the digital expanse.
Wong’s vocals on Perpetual Morphosis glow with benevolent energy, landing somewhere between swooning pop melodicism and pitch-shifted vocaloid roboticism, while his guitar playing astounds with its time-honed dexterity and crystalline looping architectures. He frequently overdubs guitar performances with contrasting effects over each other, from reverb-drenched abstraction to bright surf-rock-esque riffing to streams of rapid arpeggios animated by light distortion and echoes of delay — all of which blend with his production work into lush tableaus in which the lines between the origins of each sound start to blur. Wong’s approach as a producer to the spatialization of his varied tones congeals with his attention to filling out the entire range of the stereo spread, from bumping bass bursts to clear mid-range melodies to wailing high end klaxons. We get the sense that this composition style, uniting the reality of his physical performances with the boundless expanse of digital production, ultimately serves as the most fully realized manifestation of his music to date, giving room for nuanced emotional spaces and multi-faceted narratives that grow in step with his own curiosity and inventiveness as a composer.
Regarding the themes and ideas behind Perpetual Morphosis, Dustin Wong explained: “The music itself expresses a kind of rolling, rotating, carbonating; like a narrative of a creation myth, things just seem to get set off with a kind of idiosyncratic logic, like a Rube Goldberg machine, snowballing into something almost recognizable. That likeness is something I am interested in, like how we are amused by the clouds shaping to become something we can correlate with. It is an enjoyment to find these patterns.”
