Dirty Beaches

La Salumeria della Musica turns into the Roadhouse of Lynchtown, as Alex Zhang Hungta straps on his electric guitar and stages the voodoo psychobilly of Dirty Beaches. Basslines lifted from Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Françoise Hardy (the sample of "Voilà" stands out in the blasphemous prayer of "Lord Knows Best") are trapped in an infernal loop that hypnotizes the audience and drags them into a temporal short circuit, down rock's lost highways. Over this foundation, the microphone's echo warps and distorts a voice that seems to rise from the guts of the 1950s, turning it into an almost psychotic growl, while a saxophonist in dark glasses and a black beret weaves velvety sonic textures that stretch out into unsettling drones.

The moniker of Alex Zhang Hungta, born in Taiwan, Canadian by adoption but stateless by choice, clearly plays on ambiguity, evoking Californian beaches stained with the blood of some unsolved crime in a Raymond Chandler-style noir stripped down to its essentials, while the title of his debut album, "Badlands", pays homage to the film of the same name, the debut feature by Terrence Malick; but these are just a few of a constellation of references that shatter a diachronic imaginary only to piece it back together with spit and hair gel on stage. Among the many ghosts hovering over the performance, Alan Vega's is the most visible, yet there's none of the fourth-wall-breaking dadaism carried out by the no wave group. Indeed, the pelvic thrusts, the sixties outfits and the warm lighting all work programmatically to give shape to something as elusive as a live show, blending everything into a single texture.

Faced with all this, the audience, disoriented and enchanted, can do nothing but watch the stage crystallize into an old black-and-white frame that has undergone an anamorphic zoom. The show Dirty Beaches put on wasn't a rock concert but Cinema.

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