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To be released on CD, cassette and digitally on April 1st, 2025. CD packaged in a gatefold digipak. Tape packaging includes a 2-sided 5-panel J-Card. 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 Gloria, his third album on the label since 2018. Wong has established a multifaceted career over the last two decades that encompasses his solo work centered around guitar performance and live looping, roles as a guitarist in Baltimore-based bands Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine, and a wide catalog of collaborations with artists including Takako Minekawa, Good Willsmith, and Patrick Shiroishi. In composing his solo music, Wong has always transmuted his own life experiences into the thematic source material for emotionally resonant works rippling with fine-grain details and intricate looping architectures. With Gloria, the composer channels specific memories and pieces of his family history into a deeply personal narrative arc focused on his grandmother Gloria Violet Lee Wong, who passed away in January 2024, just shy of her 96th birthday. Using a road trip they took together down the west coast of America in 2023 as the direct inspiration for the individual scenes and flashes of imagery that form the album’s continuously unfolding structure, Wong presents Gloria as a memorial to her storied life and a celebration of the warmth and kindness that characterized their close relationship. A moment-to-moment travelogue that zooms out in its full scope to evoke a multi-generational memoir that spans decades and continents, Gloria gives Wong space to open his heart and uncover his roots — all while experimenting with new techniques in live performance and sound design that lead his music into territories that he has never before explored.

Starting fifteen years ago with a trilogy of albums released by Thrill Jockey, Dustin Wong’s solo practice began as a series of painstakingly composed and precisely performed takes with his father’s Fender Telecaster guitar run through an arsenal of effects pedals and loopers. This mode of creation found him stacking layer after layer of live input into vibrant spreads of sound that swelled to dramatic peaks, with dozens of afterimages of his own guitar swirling together as they pour back through his looping systems. His live setup came to incorporate sampling keyboards, drum machines, and his voice, and by the time his albums on Hausu Mountain emerged — Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu in 2018 (HAUSMO79) and Perpetual Morphosis in 2023 (HAUSMO135) — he had harnessed the potential of digital audio production, moving from strictly live performances into the realm of high-fidelity sound design and synthetic instrumentation. His compositions on Gloria split the difference between these two distinct modes of creation from different eras of his work: here we find live takes centered around looping individual instruments into beds of harmony and rhythm, but these takes highlight dense volleys of pitched percussion and jittering keyboard tones generated by hands-on input on a sampling keyboard. This colorful multi-instrumental palette weaves together with the spiraling output of Wong’s guitar, which reaches us in both crystalline guitar tones and alien voices that many would imagine to be synthesizers. In keeping with the trajectory of his previous HausMo albums, Wong’s voice occupies a central role in Gloria. His predominantly wordless vocals, often pitch-adjusted and processed through effect manipulation, seep naturally into his compositions as both textural elements and lead melodies and lend the music a shade of dreamlike pop composition, albeit refracted through his busy networks of cybernetic instrumentation. Whether he sings in the register of a digital murmur or overtly interprets Christian hymnals as he does on the album’s closing tracks, Wong’s angelic vocal lines call back to his grandmother’s long-standing role in her religious communities as an intercessor prayer healer and a choir singer.

While the production on Gloria bears all the meticulous editing and deliberate spatialization of pored-over digital creations, all of the tracks are song-length passages extracted from Wong’s meticulous long-form improvised sessions. To achieve the clarity of a multi-tracked album from his layered sessions, Wong separated individual stems from his live takes and arranged them into multi-layered pieces in which he has control over the presentation of every voice that hits the mix. The result is a thrilling amalgam that combines the immediacy of his live performances with a level of intricacy and production quality that attests to his ever-increasing mastery of digital arrangement. While Wong’s previous work primarily focused on the slow accumulation of loops over a central grid-like rhythmic foundation, the compositions of Gloria make use of multiple simultaneous loopers untethered in time — resulting in completely unpredictable ecosystems that draw power from chance-based interactions between systems recurring in and out of step. With these beautifully chaotic rhythms as foundations, Wong gives himself the opportunity to improvise as a lead performer and at the same time manage dense fields of sound with levels of control and detail that provide virtually limitless possibilities for him to explore.

As an album dedicated to and directly inspired by the life of his grandmother, the listener might be surprised by the sonic reality of the compositions of Gloria. Far from seeking to establish any overtly elegiac or mournful atmospheres, the album bursts with whimsy and enthusiasm, with its bouncy sampled and pitched percussion lines joining the surges of his iridescent effect-manipulated guitar performances to form complex lattices of progressive forward motion. This palette showcases the feelings central to his relationship with his grandmother, as his memories of their last road trip together glow with mirth and surprising developments: her whip-smart perception of the world and her radiating kindness towards every person the pair encountered; her frequent invocation of the angels around them (e.g.: Michael’s arts and crafts stores); reuniting with an old friend who, despite being impaired by dementia, recognized Gloria with palpable joy in her eyes; exploring the beauty of the iridescent glass beach of Fort Bragg, CA; Dustin hearing details of his grandmother’s life and the lives of his family members that he had never known before. All of these scenes appear within Gloria, noted in the track titles, as inspiration for Wong’s compositions — each of which moves far from his previous style of individual central loops that patiently build piece by piece, blooming instead into multi-segmented mini-narratives ripe with sudden transitions and evolving structures. Flashes of jaunty guitar in the surf tradition shimmer as leads in the dense webs of sound, evoking Wong’s upbringing in Hawaii, where his parents met and where he was born. The criss-crossing of guitar with vocal lines and waves of sampling keyboard simulate the form of conversations, between Dustin and Gloria, between Gloria and other family members over the phone, between the pair of them and the deep reservoir of memories and experiences that shaped their family into what it is. In choosing to conclude Gloria with a pair of gorgeous renditions of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” Wong has another conversation with his grandmother, speaking to a woman who spent decades participating in ministries as an ordained deacon, a choral singer and pianist, and an intercessor, in the sounds of the devout Christianity that shaped her life and the generations that follow it.

Gloria’s capacity to capture vestiges of the physical details of their journey together and to give auditory form to the revelations about Wong’s family that he experienced on the road with his grandmother speak to his acumen as an emotional storyteller. Even if he describes them in words, we could never access his memories with the same degree of clarity and resonance that he achieves here with sound. His compositions speak to the effect that memory has on art-making, guiding a creator’s mind and hands to capture some simulacrum of the past’s reality while attesting to the effect that music has in outlining the ineffable qualities of life experiences that we couldn’t otherwise distill. Through years of developing his artistic practice to higher levels of glistening detail and fast-paced internal motion, Dustin Wong has equipped himself with the tools necessary to give life to his memories and feelings with more variety and specificity than ever before. In talking about making Gloria, he highlights the role of the loop as a central feature of his work that dovetails both sonically and thematically. The loop represents the cycles we all experience in our lives, both within our own day to day routines and in the broader strokes of our family history in which we retread similar paths across generations. In talking to Gloria herself, Wong remembers feeling surprised by how often her life trajectory and his own so frequently looped back around along the same lines as if they were intuitively drawn back to the same places (Baltimore, California, Hawaii, Massachusetts). He recounts visiting his college cafeteria with her and being amazed when she stated, with her characteristic tenderness and sharp awareness, that the building they stood in used to be a women’s hospital, and that the hospital was where she gave birth to Wong’s father – the very same place Dustin had been eating his meals everyday. We all follow loops, often subconsciously, as they exert their force on us in ways that we can’t pretend to control or understand. With Gloria, Wong doesn’t seek to harness sound to seal off the loops contained in his family history or to arrive at any neat conclusions, but rather to allow them to keep spinning forever, to remain unclosed just as his own history continues to unfold.