Xander Patnoe was originally motivated to make music after being inspired by the soundscapes in video games. Now a fourth year Music major she is exploring potential futures in music, with a multidisciplinary look at how music affects space and multimedia settings.
Growing up in the bay area, Patnoe involved herself in music from a young age. Her dad lived in Palo Alto while her mom lived in San Francisco, so she split her time between them. Patnoe credits her grandmother as being a third parent during her childhood.
She participated in various choirs growing up, and in high school she learned basic music theory. For her senior project she composed music based on a video game. “I was very proud of that,” she says. “That was how I proved to myself that I could succeed as a music major coming to UCSC.”
Patnoe’s music builds soundscapes which she describes as “electronic, ambient, and vapor wave, in terms of genre. Each of my tracks embodies a slightly different elemental soundscape, which people can enter into and get surrounded by.” She releases her music under the pseudonym eclipse.xiv. Her songs are available on both Spotify and Apple Music along with other online platforms. She has released three full length albums: {reformations}, postsummer, and eclipseworld, all of which are available through Patnoe’s link tree.
Through music she has kept her passion for video games alive, and credits games including Super Mario Galaxy, Minecraft, and Undertale for having immersive soundscapes that influence her craft. “When I was young, I was inspired by video games’ abilities, to create entire worlds that feel lived in,” she says. “You just want to be in them.”
While at UC Santa Cruz she took a class in the fundamentals of game design, though she did not have time in her schedule to explore a major or minor in Arts & Designs: Games + Playable Media as she would have liked. One of her dreams in the future is to score video games and films and help create worlds as immersive as the ones she experienced growing up.
Patnoe’s goals soar far beyond passions for music and world building. She has a fervor for social justice organizing, and pursues smaller interests in her free time including reading and poetry writing. Currently, Patnoe is applying for graduate programs in electronic music. She hopes to attend school in London where her dad, teenage sister, and step mom live.
“Music has always been a passion,” says Patnoe. “A lot of the values and things that I really hold dear, I learned and developed through my consumption of media, such as games.”