A saxophone is usually expected to do certain things. It can sing, howl, swing, whisper, shriek, seduce, irritate the neighbours. It can be virtuosic, lyrical, vulgar, majestic. Alex Zhang Hungtai takes the instrument and appears to ask a considerably less sociable question: what happens if the saxophone forgets it was ever supposed to be a saxophone? "Dras" is the answer.

The nine pieces collected here originated in 2019, recorded inside Montreal's Saint Joseph Oratory during late-night sessions, with the vast church providing the initial acoustic environment. They then sat on Hungtai's hard drive through the pandemic before being completed during lockdown in Los Angeles. The delay is more than an interesting piece of chronology. It seems to have given the recordings time to lose their original identity. What emerged years later is not a document of a saxophonist playing inside a church, but a work assembled from the memory of that event, with digital manipulation pushing the instrument into unfamiliar territory while preserving the physical evidence of breath and pressure.

Hungtai, of course, has been doing this sort of disappearing act with musical identity for a long time. Best known initially as the force behind Dirty Beaches, he developed a deliberately elusive relationship with genre, moving through lo-fi rock'n'roll, experimental composition, free improvisation, jazz-adjacent work and increasingly abstract instrumental music. His earlier solo releases already demonstrated an interest in stripping away the recognisable functions of an instrument until something more elemental remained. On "Dras", that process becomes almost forensic.

“Erg”, the opening track, is an excellent example. There is saxophone here, but its conventional vocabulary has already begun to dissolve. Repeated figures appear and recede, tones are stretched into resonance, and the acoustic source seems to hover somewhere between instrument and environment. The piece does not announce itself with the usual gesture of a soloist entering a room. It feels as if the room was already making the sound and Hungtai merely discovered how to disturb it. The effect is strangely intimate despite the scale. This is partly because the saxophone's breath remains audible. However much the sound is processed, there is still a human body somewhere behind the electronics. The instrument strains, exhales, cracks and resonates. The digital treatment does not sterilise these qualities. Instead, it enlarges them.

“Dras” itself is considerably more severe. Tones appear to be pulled apart from within, creating metallic edges and dense resonant masses. The sound can be abrasive, but its aggression is oddly restrained. Nothing here feels like an attempt to overpower the listener. The physical force comes from the tension between recognisable instrumental origin and increasingly alien result. You know there is a saxophone in there. You just aren't sure whether it knows. That uncertainty becomes one of the album's central pleasures.

“El Khela” works through fractured gestures and spectral responses, allowing sounds to appear as though they are arriving from different depths of the same enormous acoustic chamber. The church is no longer simply an echoing venue. It becomes an invisible participant, a kind of acoustic memory that has been carried forward into the digital processing.

This is where the Saint Joseph Oratory recordings acquire their real significance. The building is enormous, with a famously resonant interior, and Hungtai recorded there under conditions designed to minimise outside noise. The resulting material contains an extraordinary amount of spatial information, but "Dras" does not behave like a field recording. Hungtai takes that spatial residue and rearranges it until physical location becomes psychological atmosphere. “Xilitla” and “Estado” make this transformation especially clear. The former seems to float away from its instrumental source almost completely, settling into sustained tones that could be mistaken for electronic composition if one did not know where they originated. “Estado” is subtler, with barely perceptible rhythmic movement giving the music a sense of direction without turning it into anything resembling a beat.

These pieces are among the album's most convincing because they demonstrate that Hungtai is not interested in hiding the saxophone. He is interested in changing the conditions under which we hear it. That is a different proposition. The distinction matters because experimental music can sometimes become obsessed with disguising its sources. Here the opposite happens. The further the sound travels from the conventional saxophone, the more one becomes aware of the instrument's physical characteristics: the vibration of metal, the pressure of air, the instability of pitch, the human effort necessary to make the sound exist. The machine does not erase the body. It puts the body under a magnifying glass.

The track titles add another layer of geographical and material suggestion. “Rub' Al Khali”, named after the vast Arabian Empty Quarter, and “Pulque”, referring to the traditional Mexican fermented drink, seem to open doors onto places and sensations without turning the music into literal travelogue. “White Dwarf” shifts the scale completely, moving from geography to astrophysics. These names are useful precisely because they refuse to explain the sounds. They provide coordinates, not destinations. And then there is “White Dwarf” itself, one of the album's most luminous moments. Its progression has a rare sense of warmth, with tones gradually revealing harmonic relationships beneath the apparent abstraction. After so much erosion, the emergence of something recognisably melodic feels almost startling. But Hungtai does not let melody settle comfortably. The tonal material remains surrounded by grain, distortion and spatial ambiguity. Beauty appears, but it arrives with its fingerprints still dirty.

This is perhaps where "Dras" differs from the more purely austere traditions of drone and electroacoustic music. Hungtai's work retains a sense of song even when the song has been almost entirely dismantled. There is an instinct for melody underneath the abstraction, a memory of phrasing that keeps resurfacing. The record never becomes purely textural because the saxophone continues to suggest a human voice.

That voice becomes most powerful on “Mazil”, the closing piece. Low, guttural tones emerge beneath thinner melodic traces, creating the sensation of something enormous moving underneath the music. The piece does not build toward a conventional climax. Instead, it gradually reveals the full physical character of the instrument. After all the processing, fragmentation and spectral manipulation, the saxophone finally seems to stand in front of us rather than behind layers of transformation. It is almost like meeting the suspect after spending an hour interviewing the fingerprints. The emotional effect is surprisingly strong.

There is loneliness in "Dras", but not the theatrical loneliness of an empty landscape. It feels more like the solitude of somebody listening carefully to their own thoughts and discovering that the thoughts have echoes. The album's repetitions and transformations suggest memory without ever becoming nostalgic. A phrase returns altered. A tone loses its original shape. Something familiar becomes difficult to recognise and then, suddenly, familiar again.

The pandemic history inevitably casts a shadow over the record, but "Dras" is fortunate enough not to sound like a “pandemic album”. There are no obvious attempts to document a particular historical moment. Instead, the long gap between recording and completion becomes part of the music's character. The sounds were captured in 2019, but their final form emerged through a period in which ordinary relationships with space, silence and physical presence were radically disrupted. That may help explain why the album feels simultaneously solitary and communal.

Hungtai made the original recordings alone with his instrument, yet the finished work is concerned with space, resonance and the sensation of sound occupying a place. It is intimate music that nevertheless seems to require a room around it.

This is also why the vinyl format makes sense. "Dras" is not background music. Its details depend on volume, physical space and the listener's willingness to remain inside sounds that do not immediately resolve themselves. The record rewards attention, but it does not demand analytical concentration. One can simply allow the textures to accumulate until the distinction between listening to music and listening to a room begins to disappear.

There is a paradox here that Hungtai handles remarkably well. The album is constructed from a very limited palette: essentially one saxophone, extensively processed. Yet it feels enormous. Conversely, the recordings were made inside one of Montreal's great architectural spaces, but the finished music often feels intensely internal.

Exterior becomes interior. Architecture becomes memory. Breath becomes electricity. And the saxophone becomes something that could almost be mistaken for a machine until the human body suddenly returns through a single cracked note.

That is the real achievement of "Dras". It does not simply demonstrate that one instrument can produce unconventional sounds. Plenty of experimental musicians have established that fact, and humanity has been dismantling musical instruments with commendable determination for decades. Hungtai goes further. He makes the transformation emotionally meaningful.

The unfamiliar noises are not trophies of technique. They are stages in a process of searching. Melodies fracture because they are being examined. Repetitions accumulate because they are trying to find a way through. Distortion becomes less an aesthetic effect than a method of seeing what remains when the familiar surface has been disturbed.

The album consequently feels less like a collection of compositions than nine examinations of resonance, each asking how much identity a sound can lose before it becomes something else. The answer, intriguingly, is: quite a lot. But not everything. The breath remains. That is enough.

"Dras" is austere without being cold, abstract without abandoning melody, and imposing without ever becoming merely loud. Its strange beauty lies in the contradiction between the enormous spaces suggested by the recordings and the unmistakably human effort contained inside every sound.

The saxophone does not disappear. It dreams itself into another form.