XIU XIU - Eraserhead Xiu Xiu

In the constellation of their own affections, it's clear that Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo count David Lynch among the brightest stars. This is evident not only in explicit tributes (“XIU XIU – Plays The Music Of Twin Peaks“, Polyvinyl, 2016), but also in their unsettling, cacophonous style, in their existential and surreal anguish, and in their ability to zero in on the ugliest neuroses of small-town America with a hyper-realism disguised as hallucination.
Given these premises, the decision to tackle “Eraserhead” shouldn't come as a surprise — if anything, it's perhaps the most natural choice imaginable. Before being committed to record, the project began as a live re-scoring of original video installations inspired by the Lynchian masterpiece. In these performances, staged in the bluish half-light of an acousmonium concert, the Californian duo gave voice to the nightmares and languors projected on screen.

The atmosphere crackles and trembles in a dense fog of static electricity that heightens the sense of estrangement. The heavy use of industrial field recordings pushes the work at times into territory reminiscent of “Pretty Hate Machine” (“Tetra”) – naturally close to the more sinister side of Xiu Xiu themselves (“Support Our Troops OH! Blacks Angels OH!” from “Fabulous Muscle“). So, amid metallic clangs, unspooled tape, unsettling intrusions of TV jingles, distorted voices, toys and jagged, invasive beats, a whole bouquet of miseries and terrors is served back to us as if we were eavesdropping from inside a horrifying tin music box.
The inevitable exercise for the listener is a dialogue with their own capacity for abstraction: trying to guess which iconic scene this or that moment of the track might correspond to. From the long stares at the radiators, to the grotesque quail dinner, to the wails of the premature infant, to the dehumanizing procession of pencils. Only “In Heaven”, with its song-form structure, manages to escape this mechanism. Presented in a darker reworking, it lets itself be clouded by the sordid tension provoked by Jamie Stewart's voice.

The end result is a layered, self-sufficient sonic body — vibrant and disturbing — able to retrace the original while adding remarkable personal counterpoints. It's an ultimately conservative approach that doesn't aim to rebuild from scratch, but rather sets out to deliver a brilliant mimicry of the work of Alan Splet and David Lynch.

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17/09/2026