Only his 2nd solo LP under his own name, following an acclaimed stretch of Dirty Beaches releases and last year's incredible Love Theme set, Divine Weight keens with a supernatural metaphysics from the disturbed air of Pierrot, its lead single, to jaw-dropping choral percolations in Matrimony, before really blinding us with the curdled dissonance of This Is Not My Country - proper lump-in-throat material - and a coruscating vignette Yasumatei, before the committing the ultimate payload of Divine Weight, where all those ideas rise to the occasion in a magisterial swell of affective harmonics that’s reducing us to tears right now.
Beyond the personal consciousness, there is the familial consciousness, above the familial there is the cultural, above the cultural, the historical, and so on ascending into the vast cosmical or spiritual consciousness. The conception of Divine Weight derives from Zhang’s “failed” attempts of saxophone compositions and recordings accumulated over the last 3 years, from there it became the actual stem tracks that were heavily digitally disfigured until it no longer resembled the sound of saxophones. Like dreams, visions often come to us without us having the capability to measure or understand fully what they mean. Similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic, dreams and visions take on the roles of witnesses inside the uncharted labyrinth of the personal sub-conscious. To witness, is to believe. To believe, is to project a certain reality onto the external world. The projection then, has nothing to do with reality. Perhaps it’s where dreams go, after it dies.
