Xiaowei Cao
Composer | Music Producer
No Hay Banda! combines video, electronic sounds, and live instruments, trying to depict a specific kind of surealistic
dream, as Stravinsky described: ‘‘...dreams in which people shout, but inaudibly, like a cinema when the soundtrack
fails, or talk fugaciously in the distance.’’ He associated these dreams with his fear of hearing loss.
I was instructed not to speak, so the musical becomes non-musical. Words become metaphors. Boxes are messengers. And the unreachable is amplified.
This piece is inspired by the poem “Red Puncta” in Jenny Xie’s poetry collection The Rupture Tense.
Patterned information has dominated our daily life - TikTok music, superhero films, internet advertisements, etc. Radio Patterns explores the possibility of generative creativity using heavily modulated and distorted patterned information. The sound art is composed of texts from randomized cosmetic ads as well as texts from the prologue of the opera Pagliacci. The texts from cosmetic ads symbolize patterned information in our life. By using multiple modulation techniques, the spoken texts gradually transform into a cluster of electronic sounds and human speech similar to radio noise. The texts from Pagliacci serve as a sarcastic reflection of the previous text, pointing out that "art is derived from real life" in an overly dramatic and contrasting way.
This piece was written for the Gil Soundtrack Award 2020 short film, which explores values related to the land, the vineyard, and the idea of family. As an international student studying in the U.S., I relate to the feelings and I wrote this piece to express not only my personal emotions, but also the unchangeable characteristics that our roots have given us.
The metropolis itself is a huge orchestra of indeterminacy, and so is the radio.
Narration Of A Strange Story was inspired by horror stories that I’ve heard when Iwas a kid. This piece is trying to recreate those generic feelings and emotions whilelistening to a horror story, and paint a vivid picture using the narration of musical elements.These emotions could be fear, could be startles, or it could be feelings of somethingsublime. The first movement narrates the unsettlement before the climax of thestory, and the second movement paints the entity of a fearful monster.