Award-winning Chinese composer Mr. Wang Gang forever approaches creativity with an astute balancing of skilfulness and a clear love for the beauty of music.
His latest work, Memory of Xinjiang, begins with a divine solo strings melody, a somewhat melancholic and reverb-kissed performance, with crucial dashes of hope, before evolving through a uniquely rhythmic bounce of an original track.
Suddenly we’re consumed by these world-music tones and rhythmic hits – hand-drums and acoustic strumming, a descending chord pattern and warming bass – a powerful sense of rising energy and optimism.
Multi-layered and boldly colourful from here on in, this post-five-minute composition is so impressively original, that it feels like a short story and experience in itself; far from merely a piece of music.
By the mid-section, we’re in new territory again – huge rhythmic hits and an extraordinary depth of sound from all instrumental parts, and the journey approaches its second moment of breathy calm; intricate, skilful playing from two instruments, a joyful dance of sorts, before voice and keys redirect things, for the next part of the story or this Memory of Xinjiang.
Beautifully complex but satisfying, a gripping theatrical composition with a mighty sense of meandering emotional purpose. Memory of Xinjiang is a sensational original composition, and draws focus to the modernization of Chinese music in recent years, and the embracing of technology alongside traditional instrumental formats, to create wholly compelling, incomparable new soundscapes.
Find Mr. Wang Gang on Instagram.
