Cancelled - Xiu Xiu

Presented by Feed Me Weird Things and Witching Hour

Xiu Xiu was born on a dance floor, arriving alone at the club and going home alone from the club.

That night the first Xiu Xiu song, Jennifer Lopez, was recorded. Its line, “is it tough to watch, Friday after Friday!?,” began what Xiu Xiu was going to try to say. The songs would always be about specific events in the personal lives of the band, the people close to them, and about the social and economic politics that effect and deform subjugated life from everywhere in this wobbling, wreck of a solar system.

Over the course of 15 7"s, five EPs, six collaboration albums and ten full lengths Xiu Xiu has never shied away from any topic that is honest and meaningful to them. Their songs are about gender dysphoria, suicide, loneliness, going insane, child soldiers, the tsunami in Indonesia, hideous sex, the Sanrio character Pandapple, abortion politics, incest, cats, queer life, being raped by the police and the individual responsibility of U.S. military personnel for the families they murder. Somehow within all of this, cuteness attempts to find a way to embrace death and horrible emotion.

The music is drawn from British post punk and synth pop, modern Western classical, noise and experimental musics, Asian percussion musics, American folk, torch singers, house, techno and 1950s rock n roll.

Starting in isolation in San Jose, California in 2002, Xiu Xiu has relentlessly toured all over the world since. San Jose is a rotten place to be, so relentless touring was a way to get AWAY!

Xiu Xiu have been called “self flagellating”, “harsh”, “brutal”, “shocking” and “perverse” but also “genius”, “brilliant”, “unique”, “imaginative” and “luminous.”

The band is Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart. Their upcoming album is Girl With A Fruit Basket.

Girl With A Fruit Basket -

It could be handfuls of reds

It could be turning Caravaggio’s Boy with Basket of Fruit to face the wall

It could be a commission by the Guggenheim entitled Deforms the Unborn

It could be the demon Vetis, whose friends call Him The Life Promiser

It could be that in 1918 a pregnant Mary Turner was hung upside down from a tree by a lynch mob while they cut out her fetus & that this could happen today, as it did then, without consequences for whitey

It could be handfuls of natural pearls

It could be collaborations with master Haitian drummers

It could be doing the wrong thing together forever

It could be long lists of how The Devil’s acts towards children before, during &
after their possession

It could be short lists of produce, insects & imagined blues musicians

It could be handfuls of an insane 9 year old's feces smushed on the lunch table

It could be a psychedelic Chicago house song about a pig & about your
parents

It could be your dad’s new husband gave you his boyhood viola

It could be a collaboration with master Yoruba drummers

It could be handfuls of cactus spines & a poison dart

It could be your sister has cancer & they keep chopping parts of her body off

It could be a conscripted arco bass piece that was a dedication to Turkish
feminists

It could be Jack Smith has a film called Normal Love

It could be scisssssssors, air conditioner tubes, glasses of ice & seashells

It could be handfuls of hot pink Make Noise 1/8inch audio cables

It could be that Nature is making it clear to us that we deserve it and that we
are making it clear to Her that we are ready, ready to go

It could be a short novel called The Rhythm Section Talked about Drugs, The Horn Players Talked about Ass & The Strings Talked about Money

It could be improvised vocals by Elliot Reed & orchestrated vocals by Eugene
Robinson

It could be that European religious paintings of male martyrs depict them surrounded by chubby, adoring angels, everyone’s tearful mothers & converted sex workers dutifully sponging out their holy & shallow wounds

It could be that European religious paintings of female martyrs depict them with their nipples being torn off, throats branded & their naked torsos flayed while they are totally alone aside from the men torturing them

It could be handfuls of Diamanda Galás & Roy Orbison action figures

It could be that despite the confusion of this life, people who can still truthfully call themselves human try to push through 2019’s collecting horror

It could be slowed down & fuzzed out field recordings of disappearing frogs

It could be flat purple & black or glossy black & purple

It could be mescal in a bottle & baby on a boob, hair dyed blonde for nobody, nobody move

It could be handfuls of that you just have to stop being a wuss & deal with it

It could be…