One of several film scores by
Dirty Beaches' Alex Zhang Hungtai,
Water Park is a far cry from albums such as
Badlands, but it shares Hungtai's gift for creating vivid atmospheres with his better-known work. Commissioned for a 16-minute documentary about the water park in the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada by Evan Prosofsky,
Water Park is nearly twice as long as the film itself, and this expansiveness extends not only to individual tracks like the nine-minutes-plus "Floating Under Water," but to the music's overall feel. Using an array of keyboards, synths, and the occasional guitar, Hungtai crafts ambient meditations that are suitably hypnotic, particularly on "Canadian Prairies" and "Like the Wind," where unhurried guitar figures float around each other, lulling the listener before they drift off. The vintage sounds and wistful mood Hungtai cultivates on pieces like "Goodbye Edmonton" might make listeners who haven't seen the documentary think that the waterpark is derelict instead of a thriving tourist attraction -- the world's second largest indoor water park, in fact -- but the score does capture the wonderfully dreamlike feel of being in the water, and fits the mood of Prosofsky's portrait of a unique Canadian landmark. ~ Heather Phares