Meet Kai Tsao | Artist & Audio Engineer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kai Tsao and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kai, what role has risk played in your life or career?
Lately, risk-taking has been more about challenging the conventions and trends of pop music – I spent a few years trying to fit the mold in terms of formatting my music, which for me meant making my songs shorter to adapt to shorter attention spans and implementing generic rhythms and progressions to make my music feel more “accessible”. Setting out to make something that was true to my own artistic impulses meant that I had to reason with myself and come to terms with the prospect of putting myself through more while gaining less attention and exposure for my work. I’d built up a bit of momentum with my profile, but it felt like I was stunting my own development.

In the end, it panned out; when I released “red” with Mei Semones I was prepared for the worst – I thought, who wants to listen to this meandering, convoluted 6-and-a-half-minute song? But lots of people did, much more than I’ve ever been used to. For me, it was some sort of affirmation, or confirmation, that it was okay to take sonic risks and just make what I wanted to hear.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Strictly speaking, I’m a musician and an audio engineer. I like sounds and I like making things sound special. Because of the people around me and their talents, though, my art has evolved into this amalgamation of music, illustration, and film. My latest work is a project called “tungsten,” and it’s this weird spin on quantum physics and half-lives in art form – basically the idea is that we live in binaries, which for me means life as an artist and life as an engineer, life as one of two brothers, life as a Taiwanese-American living one life on the East Coast and one on the West, life as a musician and life as an engineer. It’s a dual project: an EP and a short film trilogy, which are simultaneous experiences that you can only perceive one of at any given moment.

I think it’s my most engaging and labored work yet, and it was terrifying to make – for the most part, the only reason it ever got made was my fear of not finishing it. I didn’t so much overcome my challenges as I did simply endure them with brute force, and to be honest, it’s been a brutal journey, and I think it’ll take quite some healing before I’m ready to embark on another one.

At the end of the day, though, one of my biggest goals with this project is to de-mystify the creative process of something like this. Lots of people want to make music and lots of people want to make films, and while what I accomplished might look impressive or impossible (three films in six months with no label or big production company is insane), I want to show audiences as much of the process as I can, just to show exactly what we went through and provide some inspiration. It’s kind of my way of saying that you can just make the art you want to make, and that if I can do it, anyone can.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I’m pretty new to New York, so I don’t have the deepest insight as to what there is to do in the city, but I’d take my friends on a ferry somewhere, hang out at Prospect Park, eat at Chelsea or Essex market, do a day trip to Flushing, and walk around Dumbo. I love reading, so I’d probably take them to the Hunters Point library in LIC or the Strand in Manhattan. Most of my friends are artists, so I’d swing by Studio 45 with them – I just discovered them today because I heard that someone from my high school back in California opened an art space. It’s this cozy space in Bushwick that hosts open studios and events almost every day, and since my girlfriend has been looking for somewhere to work on her art it was kind of a gem of a discovery.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d love to shoutout my video team ORANGEJUUZ (pronounced “orange juice”) – we created a short film trilogy designed to be the “other half” of my latest EP. My director Ben See-Tho and I independently funded and produced this trilogy, and we’re really proud of the work we’ve done, and the community that we were able to support by providing this project as a platform for young creatives (in college or fresh out of college) to pursue their professional endeavors. Ben and I have now made some thirteen music videos together (the trilogy being the 11th, 12th, and 13th) and without him, my art would not have as strong a visual identity as it now does.

Website: kaitsaomusic.com

Instagram: @kaitsaomusic

Facebook: @kaitsaomusic

Youtube: youtube.com/kaitsao

Other: spotify – spoti.fi/2JSNFuj film trilogy – https://youtu.be/SAnLbtMvO4w?si=CZ7MfxJVIV9_gD4X

Image Credits
Jett Yamada, Benjy Berkowitz, Kevin Zhang