Wounded Healer (Without Dependency)

Description:

To conclude their residency at Western Front, Julian Hou, Prince Nifty, Eddy Wang, and Fan Wu presented a concert that doubled as the launch of Wu’s debut album touch The Ten Thousand Things without dependency (2023). Produced by Prince Nifty, the album takes its title from a mantra for a form of Enlightenment that’s simultaneously sensual and bereft of attachment.

Throughout the evening, audience members were invited to sit in chairs or on the floor of the Grand Luxe Hall, which was bathed in an otherworldly glow of blue, pink, and green overhead lights. The evening opened with a poem by Kiel Torres with accompaniment by Prince Nifty on synthesizer. Then, Eddy Wang debuted a suite of live songs from his earnestcore project Ira Dot. Wang began his set by inviting the audience to join him in a collective hum to a shruti box tone—a gesture that was repeated later in the evening to close the event. To mark the end of the first half of the concert, Julian Hou performed a selection of songs on acoustic guitar.

Following an intermission, Prince Nifty performed a spatialized set that layered ambient electronics, vocals, and woodwind instruments through various layers of effects across a quadraphonic speaker system. Bookending the evening with readings, the concert closed with the debut of a new poem by Fan Wu titled “Aspects of the Wounded Healer.” Wu was backed by an ensemble of players including his fellow artists-in-residence, and collaborators Amy Gottung (flute), Michael Joseph Loncaric (bass), and Spencer Cole (piano). Moving between ambient drone and high energy funk, the instrumentation followed Wu’s exploration of the wounded healer—a mythic figure who must pass through the stages of self-sabotage and shamanic devotion to arrive at the place of alchemical integration.