Photo by Jennelle Fong – courtesy Hausu Mountain
Dustin Wong has been an important part of the guitar-based experimental music panorama since the beginning of the past decade, producing a body of work that is quietly playful, through an approach to improvisation and electronics that creates mazes of layered sounds. We had the chance to converse with Dustin over email, the result of which you can find below, edited and formatted for clarity.
David Murrieta Flores (ACL): Hi Dustin! Could you please talk a bit about yourself and the music you make, for those readers unfamiliar with your work?
Dustin Wong (DW): Hello David, where to begin… I started playing publicly about 20 years ago with a few bands in Baltimore. I started playing shows with my childhood friend Yutaka Houlette and we formed Onsen – a guitar duo – and I collaborated with Matt Papich to do Ecstatic Sunshine. He went on to further pursue this project and is now doing a solo project called Co La, which is excellent and is part of a group called Lifted. I was in a four-piece band called Ponytail which was a school project where the professor of the class chose the members for you. I really was curious about the challenge and we made it work, ending up becoming a pretty ambitious project. I went on to pursue my own solo music, focusing on guitar loops and layering. I went on to collaborate with Takako Minekawa, we made 3 records, and that began our exploration of sampling and later to a more improvisational realm.
ACL: The title of your newest release, Perpetual Morphosis, seems like a renovated take on the ideas you explored with Fluid World Building 101 With Shaman Bambu. Both are part of the Hausu Mountain Extended Universe, which leads me to ask: what are the commonalities between these albums, and where do they diverge?
DW: It does feel like it is in the same lineage, it definitely is. I self-released 6 records on my Bandcamp page between Fluid World Building 101 with Shaman Bambu and Perpetual Morphosis. And it has been an incremental learning experience. Fluid World Building felt more like a simulation, like throwing a stone as far as I could and seeing where it would drop, since all the ideas were placed on the DAW one at a time, but having one rule: no second or third takes, in hopes to keep me on my toes and to create spontaneity. Since Fluid World Building, it has been about how to achieve this feeling live, in a performance. So one loop pedal became two, then three, and now four. But ultimately, it is about letting the sounds take you to another place, to be able to travel by being still. Having 4 loop pedals and my different sounds, there is a notion of predictable accidents, yet the patterns or timbre of the sounds might be something I haven’t yet discovered.
ACL: Generally speaking, I believe your work is marked by the minimalist interest in process. Which is sort of what the word “morphosis” means – something in the making, acquiring form. What does your own development as a musician, as well as the way your music has developed over time, looks like to you, in terms of the form it’s been acquiring?
Photo by Jennelle Fong – courtesy Hausu Mountain
DW: When I first started making music by myself, I was pretty clueless about making music or playing in general. I did have this Mac OS 9 software called SoundEdit 16 and it allowed me to place sounds by punching in numbers like 0.1 seconds of C# and then 0.2 seconds of silence, and so on. I would sing the next note and find it on the virtual keyboard within the software. It took a long time, but from there it switched to me using actual instruments like keyboards and guitar, where I would record one note at a time. Since then I got better at my instruments and things are more immediate and I want things to become more so. English is my second language, I grew up speaking Japanese, so forming sentences in English was almost like lifting a heavy weight, but as the sentences are formed by and through the habit of repetition and correlation, it starts to become a joy to articulate and experiment in that.
ACL: I feel that in Perpetual Morphosis there’s a distinct concern with how sounds depend on each other, how it’s impossible to conceive of a form in isolation. Could you please talk about how you view relationships between sounds?
DW: There is a necessity for the unexpected or an element of surprise to be a part of the process. My neighborhood can get a bit loud sometimes, and yet it still has its tranquility from time to time. There are sirens, people shouting or fighting, the tamales lady that chants “tamales” at the intersection on Sundays. These sounds bleed in when I practice, and it has been welcomed into my space as a suggestive muse. I have placed sounds in certain places just because a car might have honked at that time or an external noise might influence me to apply something to the composition.
Since the pandemic, a group of amazing people started organizing outdoor shows in public spaces. When it comes to shows indoors a lot of factors can feel like an intrusion to the music, like people talking over the music. When the music is outside and scaled right these sounds don’t become intrusive, they become part of the music. When the scale of the music, or volume, is louder the conversations get louder. Whenever I would work with an engineer at a show, I would ask them to make it as loud as the room, not any louder. Like Tony Smith’s cube which is scaled to the average adult human, or Dire Straits in the early days telling the engineer to turn them down so the audience can talk.
Photo by Jennelle Fong – courtesy Hausu Mountain
[In this sense,] when it comes to performance, the outdoors is great. Of course it can’t be too big, because I really don’t like big music festivals for this reason. There is an organization here in LA called Floating, and they do small scale outdoor shows and it is a really beautiful experience. When it is a smaller scale people can enjoy the music and do their thing, talking to friends, petting their dog, etc. You are able to go back and forth from intentful listening to peripheral listening. I test out my recordings this way: does it work peripherally? I will be doing other tasks while it is playing in the background and if it still holds interest, then it works.
ACL: This brings me to the question of stability and change, of sameness and difference. Would you see these sets of terms as interchangeable (stability = sameness, change = difference), or are they distinct in some ways for you?
DW: I have been working with motifs rather than compositions in my live performances, a handful of ideas that are repeatable yet different every time I play it.
I use 4 loop pedals, and each loop pedal has the ability to go in reverse, raising the pitch/speed by two fold or slowing it two fold. I often will bounce ideas on to the next pedal. Let’s say the phrase is in 3 over 4. I am bouncing this idea to the next looper in double speed, but I am counting 13 over 12. It’s not perfect since I am playing off of my own body clock, but the two loops then will stimulate each other and create these new patterns that now become something that can be bounced on top to the 3rd. These loops can become unstable of course, it has to be corralled, and bounced onto the next in order for it to achieve stability, but once that is established the dynamism isn’t quite there, and I often feel a need to introduce a loop that corresponds yet is independent to this established loop. I call it a “shelf life”, that loops can go bad after a few repetitions, and of course it needs to repeat a whole lot more for it to ferment into something else, and that’s not really what I am going for. It may have been a stew at one point, but now it is closer to a salad.
ACL: Does this mean that sometimes you end up playing something you do not intend to, or that maybe you do not like, but have to work through anyway?
DW: Oh for sure, in a live setting it happens from time to time. Sometimes I would have to clear away everything that was happening before and just focus on that “mistake” and use that to create a new palette or backgrounds, which could be rhythmic or sheets of drones. A moment of acceptance and development.
ACL: Given the importance of technique in giving/acquiring form, could you please talk us through the gear you used and how you used it for Perpetual Morphosis?
Photo by Jennelle Fong – courtesy Hausu Mountain
DW: The process would often be me improvising from 30 minutes to an hour, intending to create a space or a landscape. From these recordings, I edit, retrace, and add onto to flesh out the ideas. I think we all have had our moments staring at clouds and seeing different things. That is essentially it. There is a drawing exercise, where you scribble as many random curlicues and shapes nonsensically until you fill the paper. Then you stare and start blocking out things you recognize. A mouse might appear, or a human face, etc. It is something that pulls something from you onto the paper.
ACL: That was a lovely description, thanks. Do you intend for listeners to do the same with your work, to sort out meaningful, unconscious sound configurations or images from it?
DW: If they want to, for sure. But I really don’t mind people using music as background either. I used to paint a lot in my early twenties, so I understand. I think my music can help your paintings though!
ACL: There’s an interesting bit of information in the liner notes – they mention your voice. I might’ve failed utterly as a listener, but I was never able to identify a sound I’d straightforwardly attribute to a human singing or speaking. What’s the voice’s role in the album, and in the idea of morphosis at large?
DW: The voice is definitely there, in a lot of the tracks. Like “Pegasi”, there is a background chorus that is one of the factors in keeping the momentum of the piece. Oftentimes, it is part of the engine or propulsion of the pieces. “Pegasi” in general, is about the pegasus. Perseus cuts Medusa’s throat and the Pegasus is born from the amputated area. I find it really profound and beautiful, a winged horse coming from the bleeding neck of serpentine hair. It is hard to describe but the Rothko paintings at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, the later paintings, the dark ones, the possibilities of that darkness has that potential for something to be born.
The use of vocals for me and the syllables and rhythm is like the beginnings of a language or the potential of creating a word. The phonetics are like building blocks. I feel like it is in line with Yoshimi from OOIOO and the Boredoms, she has a notebook of “lyrics” and it’s basically all phonetic syllables, and that “scatting” or whatever you want to call it is kind of something figuratively abstract, yet substantially human. I don’t know if its in line with the tradition of Hugo Ball or Dada but, maybe, since this is in the context of typed keys, asdf, asdf, asdf, asdf, that visually might have someone think of a person running their fingers on a surface, out of impatience, or boredom.
Whether it’s your actual voice, sampled or autotuned, it’s a timbre and texture that is so unique to that person. Why not use it? It’s a texture that is so human. There is something about hearing that sliding screech of the acoustic guitar, it is because we can touch that sound of that human finger.
Photo by Jennelle Fong – courtesy Hausu Mountain
ACL: I’d like to talk about the mythological aspect of your art. I think there’s a lot of intercultural and even anthropological thought in your work with Takako Minekawa, for instance, so in keeping with the theme, how has that line of thought changed across your practice, and how has it remained the same? What kinds of myths have made you think this way?
DW: Myths have always been fascinating to me, I feel like there is something of a genetic memory that we all have to these pagan beginnings, and they reflect all the beauty and flaws of humanity. We all read these stories and say, “wow, weird!” In the details it just shows complex relationships with the beings and spaces around you. Sounds are like that, in a way. When it becomes music, these beings dance together, repel from each other, come together, and so forth.
[I go back to] Medusa, Perseus and the Pegasus, and the moment of the beheading. It feels like a Rube Goldberg machine, you know, like this conflict is happening, and there is a decisive incision and out of the neck of Medusa comes this Pegasus. In Japanese mythology, Izanagi (kind of like Adam of Adam and Eve) and his wife Izanagi have a baby. Izanagi births a fire god that burns her to death; out of anger, Izanagi kills the fire god with a sword. The blood turns into about eight different new gods and the corpse itself becomes eight new gods. The animations by Bruce Bickford, [who made a short Prometheus film], get this feeling in a tactile way.
ACL: If anything, myths are about world-building, about how forms relate to each other. Could you walk us through the mythological figures that feature in Perpetual Morphosis?
DW: “Janus Juggles” is the gate we enter into, a symmetry of two heads. As they juggle they are in the role of a jester, catching the balls, and sometimes dropping them. The old lords of Japan had a kind of luxury where they would have jugglers, and they would contemplate on them as a microcosm to the universe. Something so small can be the metaphor for something so much bigger.
“Audhumla Thaw” is a Norse creation myth, of Audhumla the primeval cow that licks and melts the salt off of Buri, Grandfather to Odin. Ymir fed from her milk, and he eventually became the earth. I do love the imagery of Buri emerging from these minerals, I would imagine Michaelangelo felt that way when he sculpted from stone bringing out these figures.
Photo by Jennelle Fong – courtesy Hausu Mountain
ACL: How do you relate these myths from very different cultures to each other?
DW: They all thematically rhyme with each other, because we all have similar experiences living amongst each other. We are born, we grow, make friendships, betrayal, etc. We are all evolving in order to accept our animal humanity. We are still figuring it out and the echoes of these stories gives us that reflection, and it can be painful and subjectively ugly.
ACL: Generally speaking, how do you conceive of the connection between music and myth? More specifically, how does that connection work out when thinking in terms of electronics, minimalism, and experimental music?
DW: I find myths and especially creation myths to be nebulous, globular, anamorphic, and that oozy jewel of a narrative lets us make sense of it all as we contort our faces in an effort to understand. The face when a guitarist bends a note, the transformation from one note becoming another. Orpheus is basically a new age harpist who became a noise musician as he returns from Hades after failing to rescue his lover. That one who is the same becomes something different, which might add to the answer to your prior question of sameness and difference.
I think it really has something with me making visual work as a teenager, painting, making collages. The idea of applying marks or imagery on a canvas, it stays there. There is a decay with sound, yet the impressions last in one’s mind. That relationship is something that I have been exploring, how can I have canvases for sound. Kind of like Tom Cruise in Minority Report with that augmented reality computer interface?
ACL: I’d like to draw the interview to a close by asking about the album art. First, can you tell us a bit about how you selected it, and second, can you tell us your interpretation of it?
DW: These are videos that I have been experimenting with over the past 6-7 years. They were a part of an art exhibition at the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) in Los Feliz here in Los Angeles last spring and also at the Current Gallery in Baltimore. They gave me the opportunity to do a solo show and I set up these video installations. The show was under the same name, Perpetual Morphosis. PRS is connected to Manly P. Hall, who has researched global religions and myths and made a library at this center. These videos were intended to bring out the mythologies within us – by seeing the shapes and lines and making our own narratives that are inherently yours. Like in the tradition of Brion Gysin’s “dream machine”. My pieces moved much slower than the dream machine, but it was made to stimulate your inner myth. Hausu Mountain will have these videos up soon!
ACL: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions, Dustin. Is there anything you’d like to add for our readers before we go?
DW: Please check out these people: Patrick Shiroishi, Brin, Celia Hollander, Jeremiah Chiu, Ahnnu, Booker Stardrum, Ben Babbitt, AV Moves, Marta Tiesenga, Co La, Takako Minekawa, Julius Smack, Gregory Uhlmann, Kyoko Takenaka, Lifted, goo age, Andy Loebs, Euglossine, Ari Liloia, Greg Fox. I am missing some people for sure… but I hope these can lead to other branching interests!
a closer listen 