Xeno & Oaklander - Analog elegance

When an old plot of land starts being tilled again after a long time, it can become fertile once more. That's how minimal wave got moving again, in the first decade of this century, thanks to a series of more or less acclaimed names and a flat-out refusal to adapt to new technologies: all it took was a voice, an analogue synthesizer and a drum machine. This was taught to us with great effectiveness by a number of projects coming mostly from Germany (Echo West, Bakterielle Infektion, Second Planet, Qek Junior, The Rorschach Garden) and from North America, as in the case of the Canadians Automelodi or Xeno & Oaklander.

As often happens in the best fairy tales, fate played a crucial role in the birth of this duo. Sean McBride (American) and Liz Wendelbo (of French-Norwegian origin) met by chance at a party inside a large building frequented by a group of artists: Sean had his recording studio in there, while Liz was DJing downstairs that day.

At the time, Sean had already set up a project called Moravagine, which from 2004 became Martial Canterel. Initially, at least here in Europe, this was the strictly personal creation of his that we first got to know, one that over the years became a kind of more intimate universe (though not musically far removed) compared to the now-celebrated partnership under discussion here.

The first moves under the Xeno & Oaklander name weren't long in coming. Vigils (2006) is an EP in which everything seems to click, above all thanks to Liz's voice, a necessary counterpoint capable of setting X&O apart from the many other acts in circulation, often accused in the long run of being excessively monotonous (in this respect, Sean and Liz's work even served as an inspiration for some projects that would emerge later on, such as Sixth June or Linea Aspera). Curiously, among these seven tracks there's even room for a song sung in Italian, "Non Senti", as if to immediately underline the international nature of a project rooted in New York but in truth ready to embrace the whole world.

We stay in the Big Apple, in the second half of the 2000s. A very active figure within the scene is Pieter Schoolwerth, founder of a cult label called Wierd Records. Besides the aforementioned Automelodi, Wierd also made room for other acts: from Led Er Est (creators of the surprising "Dust On Common") to Martial Canterel, right up to Xeno & Oaklander, finally ready in 2009 for their proper debut, Sentinelle.

The album opens with a track already used for a 7" and sung by both Sean and Liz, "Saracen", an undeniably compelling calling card, as well as a damn gloomy one. This leaden, melancholy mood runs through the entire record, here and there broken up by livelier passages (Sean's baroque flourishes on the excellent "Preuss") that are no less dark for it. The atmosphere turns positively oppressive when the album heads down more subtly experimental paths, as with the menacing "Another". The quality is there and it shows, because within a few months Sentinelle is already on everyone's lips.

Two years pass and, again on Wierd Records, it's the turn of Sets & Lights, still to this day the only record on whose cover Sean and Liz appear. While on one hand the duo tries in some way to let a few rays of light filter through (the dynamism of "Years Before" or the danceable synth-pop of "The Staircase"), it's still an unsettling melancholy that dominates: the album marks a slight step back compared to the debut, but among its grooves lies one of the finest moments in the entire career of Xeno & Oaklander, "Desert Rose" (a magnificent poem sung as a duet), not to mention a second tribute to our homeland ("Italy" is a fairly successful instrumental piece).

Fate came into play here too: after all, it was never hard to spot Sean McBride on our shores (seeing as he was dating an Italian girl), with a fair amount of live activity that followed in a number of clubs on the national dark scene.

With the move to Ghostly International, 2014 marks the duo's return, even as the minimal wave current was all but running its course, on the verge of being supplanted by fresher, more modern sounds derived from electrowave (not coincidentally, it's in 2014 that the first offerings from Boy Harsher start to appear).

Par Avion inaugurates a series of covers marked by cold, surgical geometric designs, while musically one senses a desire to reclaim the coldest, darkest coordinates of the genre, fuelling them with an openly baroque approach to synths. The result proves decidedly solid (the title track's sorrowful decay pairs perfectly with the penetrating poetics of "Sheen") but isn't matched two years later by the less inspired and overly experimental Topiary, an album introduced by a fine single ("Marble") but by then swallowed up by a scene increasingly uninterested in this coldwave-derived minimalism. Sean McBride, however, as he stated a few months earlier in one of our interviews, never wanted to budge an inch ("usually people prefer new things, but the way I see it, from 1978 to 1984 there was a true golden age of musical instrumentation, and that's what we try to reproduce").

In recent years, the Xeno & Oaklander experience seems to have found a second life, probably also thanks to the involvement of Dais Records, the American independent label often on the lips of many enthusiasts (and with a thoroughly respectable roster). The phase of apparent stalemate was thus put to rest in 2019 with the release of Hypnos, a work inspired by the Greek god of the same name (Hypnos was a deity capable of sending messages from his cave through dreams). Sean McBride picks up some polyphonic synthesizers again and begins translating the past (mythology) into the present, updating the sound with flashes of pure, hard synth-pop (from "Angélique", sung in French, to the danceable drift of "The Light, The Whisper"), in a turn that best showcases Liz's sensual voice, whose contribution behind the microphone grows ever more mature and decisive: out of the sea foam emerges a new femme fatale still waiting to be discovered.

This is a very incisive restart for X&O, since the intriguing ideas put on the table with this comeback are further developed on the following Vi/deo, an album introduced by a cover that's nothing short of telling: this time around, the colour brought into play is a warm, saturated red, whose pairing with blue creates a contrast that dazzles both the eye and the mind. Sean and Liz thus open the doors to a kind of retro-futurist imagery, as if these eight compositions came from inside a cathode-ray tube. The past is filtered through technology, that (old) technology which once seemed able to throw open a window onto new horizons (titles like "Television" or "Technicolor" instantly make the point unmistakable).

The record proves quite varied and eclectic, moving between gorgeous synth-pop forays ("Raingarden"), sinuous nods to French pop ("Afar") and an even more elegant, refined style ("Poison" is the album's undisputed gem).

Their third album for Dais Records is titled Via Negativa (In The Doorway Light), and it keeps following the winning path of the previous two records, once again oscillating between danceable synth-pop and deep minimal textures (thanks to Sean McBride's magnificent analogue obsession). Constantly moving between two opposites ("a negative image of the positive", as the duo themselves put it), the album brings to light some true gems, such as the sparkling "Actor's Foil" and "O Vermillion".

What's more, McBride's voice once again takes on a central role, pairing up again with Liz Wendelbo's. Theirs is, now more than ever, an alchemical rapport, a chemical communion — or we could describe in a thousand other ways this prolific, long-lasting creative partnership between the two musicians.

So if Xeno & Oaklander can be considered the last standard-bearers of a long season dominated by the minimalist darkwave revival, it's not simply down to talent: their imperceptible yet ever-present artistic evolution has quietly carried them beyond the genre's classic stereotypes ("We actually try to be an extension of all that", Sean McBride once said, well ahead of the curve). Because in their case, the past has also embraced the future.

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