Xiu Xiu

For its eighth date (following names like Jennifer Gentle, Ufomammut, Paolo Benvegnù, and preceding none other than Current 93), the Hey Sun! Festival – a joint venture between La Mela di Newton, the Unwound Club and the City of Padua – picked one of the most important, original and (arguably) influential bands of the past decade, Xiu Xiu.

Hardly helped by the weather (which forced everything indoors at the Unwound, dashing the original plan to make use of the Parco Fantasia), or by Dylan's show that same evening just a few hundred metres away, the Xiu Xiu set proved to be more than memorable.

( r ), the project led by Fabrizio Palumbo, originally guitarist of Larsen, and lately a prolific musician/collaborator shining across all sorts of ventures (and a longtime devotee of Xiu Xiu, as shown by the two albums made with the Larsen-Jamie Stewart supergroup, XXL), as well as a driving force behind mostly obscure projects (his own Blind Cave Salamander among them), opens the show.

The artist tinkers with all manner of post-rock and electro tricks (courtesy of the skilled Daniele Pagliero, also behind the solo project Lo Dev Alm) to wander far and wide through the limbo described by the very latest Swans and the early Mike Gira. Cohen-esque litanies, industrial loops, drum'n'bass slowed to a dark-tinged agony, panicked drones and cosmic storms are characters that appear irrationally throughout his compositions, fraying their very nature until they become a pure act of contrition.

The Xiu Xiu sound is, first and foremost, the sonic equivalent of contemporary post-industrial anxiety. Their trademark boldness (Stewart and his musical partner, the excellent Angela Seo) certainly belongs to rock music, but follows a philosophy drawn from experimental theatre, if not from happening art. The listener is implicitly and subtly called upon to draw their own conclusions, to identify on various levels with that sound, because it's a sound that no longer even belongs to its author, but scatters, dissolves, seeps into the audience until it negates itself. Xiu Xiu is the sound of the absence of reference points, whether moral or rational.

But it's the live experience that clarifies their abilities, unravelling the enigma behind such dense sound. Jamie Stewart is one of those rare cases of talent concentrated in a single musician: an excellent singer and an excellent guitarist, both at the top of his contemporaries' game. Proof of his extraordinary voice, a languid, breathless, transcendental Morrissey, comes immediately in “Black Drum Box” (after an opening dedicated to the two of them applauding the crowd), whose operatic crooning openings become true harmonic pillars. Displays of absurdist guitar work emerge, more than at any other moment, in the interlude “Poe Poe”, where Stewart disintegrates a peaceful music-box-like strumming pattern through avalanches of shocking cacophony.

Angela Seo, on metallic percussion (a whole array of cymbals, gongs and bells) and electronic devices, is a little prodigy. It's she who paints a hysterical version of “I ♥ The Valley”, almost entirely built on an obsessive pattern, and the existential industrial of “Guantanamo Canto”, over which she improvises and dissonates with maniacal devotion.

Together, the two are nonetheless well above the sum of their parts. Their post-post-wave, closely watched over by the ghost of Pere Ubu when it comes to electronic dynamite, atrocious noise torture and stretches of non-music, reveals a tendency that culminates in “Gayle Lynn”, where near-toy timbres are forced to rage for a few moments into a brutal free-jazz skit worthy of Cecil Taylor, right in the middle of a comfortable psych-pop groove. “Muppet Face”, a record of sheer ferocity, proceeds with beats that are initially steady but then thrown off course by every kind of trick, before being left to detonate in a space devoid of any rational meaning.

Another masterclass in execution, “Apistat Commander” (a suicidal whirlpool of agonized vocals, guitar delirium over ping-ponging drum machine and terrifying cubes of noise in the style of Gordon Mumma), acts as something of a counterweight to the introverted, surreal danceability coming from “Dear God I Hate Myself”, and in particular from “Chocolate Makes You Happy”, perhaps the only concession to a normality (albeit no less demonic) that gets the packed crowd moving.

A single musical (and anti-musical) body, with no encore to follow, which the duo – exhausted too by the heat built up over the set – delivers with disarming skill and a professionalism sui generis (further exaggerated by Stewart's private gargling between songs), a vital vehicle for conveying the genuine credibility of their non-nihilistic non-message, which is at once a warning, an essence stripped of all frills, and – perhaps – a portent of a new era. If true art lies in balance, and sometimes in a balance between extremes and hostility, then Xiu Xiu have by now put down solid roots in it.

(photo contributions courtesy of deSna B.)

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