Xiu Xiu

In a weird way (and what other way could there be?), there is no more apt a group to perform Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch's unmistakeable score for Lynch's utterly seminal Twin Peaks TV series than Jamie Stewart's Xiu Xiu. Like the show, their music is am alluring cross-talk of jarring signifiers – elusive flirtations with genre, dream logic, dark-lit explorations of sexual deviance – which, taken whole, form an uncomfortable sense, a penetrative, unspoken truth it seemed impossible to arrive at.

Commissioned to perform the work at 'David Lynch: Between Two Worlds', an exhibition and retrospective co-curated by Lynch in Brisbane this April, Xiu Xiu will then bring this very special, due-diligent but beautifully damaged homage to a select set of European stages, as performed by Stewart (vocals, guitar, synth and noise), Shayna Dunkelman (vibraphone, drums, keyboard) and Angela Seo (synth, percussion, noise)

This is an entirely new interpretation of the music of Twin Peaks; one emphasising its chaos, drama, fear, noise and sidelong leering glances. Be warned: BOB will be conducting.

»The music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans. It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. The idea of holding the «purity» of the 1950s up to the cold light of a violent moon and exposing the skull beneath the frozen, worried smile has been a stunning influence on us. There is no way that we can recreate Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch's music as it was originally played. It is too perfect and we could never do its replication justice. Our attempt will be to play the parts of the songs as written, meaning, following the harmony melody but to arrange in the way that it has shaped us as players«

Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu

Xiu Xiu is the conduit for the uncompromising and unnervingly personal musical works of Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist Jamie Stewart, plus a roll call of collaborators both in studio and onstage, most recently Angela Seo. Streaming forth a ceaseless gush of releases, side projects, art offerings and extensive international touring since 2002, Xiu Xiu has acted as a stark and brutally frank document of Jamie’s personal life, mapped to music that has veered from damaged avant-pop, artfully orchestrated rock, squalls of black-hearted noise and most bases around and between, and ever served with a bruising honesty and intensity that has ripped out the hearts of a legion of obsessive listeners.

Xiu Xiu’s latest album, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, is a departure again, a purposeful stride into the void. A treatise on the violent and Santa Muerte-ruled neighbuorhood MacArthur Park in Los Angeles where the band lives and records, the music is a spitting, bubbling broth of drum machines, electronics and piercing lyricism delivered in Stewart’s singular cowering croon. Brewed up in tribute to Einstürzende Neubauten, Suicide, Nico and the experimental side of Kraftwerk, at times here Xiu Xiu sound like a noxious ghost alliance between recent Scott Walker and some crepuscular oddity on Blackest Ever Black. Live, it will be played as a three-piece, a darkened and exploding battery of true analog synth and masterfully played, fuzz-treated percussion, with Stewart and Seo joined by New York-based 'retro-future drummer' Shayna Dunkelman.

Never a group willing not to work, Xiu Xiu has collaborated live or in the studio with Grouper, Michael Gira, Deerhoof, Carla Bozulich, Nitzer Ebb, Larsen, Little Annie, Oxbow (see the unflinching Sal Mineo collaboration with Eugene Robinson), Lawrence English, Zola Jesus, Devendra Banhart and Baby Dee, and with visual artists including Monika Gryzmala, David Horvitz and Dahn Vo.

The word Xiu Xiu is said to mean »cute«, a poisonous flower, a child’s word for pee pee and the name of a film portraying a young woman’s death during the Cultural Revolution.

[k]tunes Konzertvorschau

Adnan Softić / Günter Reznicek: Slawendisko // PeterLicht // Messer über Boris Vian //Phuong-Dan presents: Music from high wires #2 // Tindersticks //Radio Doria // Xiu Xiu plays the Music of Twin Peaks // Phuong-Dan presents: Music from high wires #3 // Jan Plewka / Leo Schmidthals / Tom Stromberg // Michy Reincke