Prairie WWWW is an experimental folk band formed in Taipei, Taiwan in 2010. Its music combines poetry, folk, ambient and tribal elements. The four Ws in the Praire’s band name are muted, serving as a pictogram for a waveform as well as the imagery of the grass that blowing in the wind.
Since its formation, Prairie WWWW has released eight music works and one poetry anthology. They have been participating a number of important music festivals in Taiwan, including Megaport Festival, On Site and Witch Festival. In 2016, Prairie WWWW was invited by Japanese record label Guruguru Brain to release their first vinyl record Wu-Hai EP in Japan, and to attend 2016 Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia in UK. From 2017, Prairie WWWW has been attending festivals overseas, including Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, Spain (2017), Fuji Rock Festival in Japan (2017) and SXSW Festival, Texas, USA (2018). Prairie WWWW was awarded in Taiwan and overseas, including the Jury Prize of Golden Indie Music Awards 2019 among others.
Recently, they developed numerous collaborative projects with visual artists, which could be found in Very Mixer (2020), with artist Xu-Zhan Zhang, Demo-Art: Culture Plasticizing Movement n.0 Now (2021-2022, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts) and 2022 Asian Art Biennial.
The threads that keep flowing amidst the real and the virtual are dead ringers for the multiple paths to the world that connect all the relations in different universes.
Based on the pluralistic stories of the ethnic groups in Taiwan, the legends of humans metamorphosing into flora and fauna, the change of natural environment, and the rituals of ethnicity, this performance not only portrays the diverse, complex symbiotic relationships between humanity and the environment, among divergent ethnic groups, and among different species, but also contains the metaphors for the birth, sustainability and blessing of life.
Simulating the sense of space of natural sounds as the basis for musical imagination, this performance is intended to explore the agile transformation of traditional Taiwanese ballads and ancient Austronesian tunes. Accompanied by the repeated nursery rhyme-like chant, this performance gets the ball rolling on interpreting the sound ballads of Taiwan as a subtropical island.
