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.

Streaming forth a ceaseless torrent of releases, side projects, art offerings and extensive international touring since 2002, Xiu Xiu's music has veered from damaged avant-pop to artfully orchestrated rock, squalls of black-hearted noise and most bases around and between, ever served with a bruising honesty and intensity that has ripped out the hearts of a legion of obsessive listeners.

For 2019 live operations Xiu Xiu is manifest in the form of Stewart, Thor Harris and Jordan Gieger (Minus Story/Shearwater).

'GIRL WITH BASKET OF FRUIT'

Scisssssssors

UTR113 | CD/LP | 9 tracks | Buy

Latest Xiu Xiu album 'Girl with Basket of Fruit' (out Feb 2019) is a rowdier, yet more stylistically splenetic offering than 2017's 'Forget', with the usual eye-catching list of collaborators this time including Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Devin Hoff and Haitian percussionists Emmanuel Obi and Ayo Okafor. Here's Xiu Xiu's take on the new album...

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 that you just have to stop being a wuss & deal with it

It could be...

'FORGET'

Wondering

UTR091 | CD/LP | 10 tracks | Buy

'FORGET' was recorded during a period of epic productivity for Xiu Xiu. While writing 'FORGET', they released the lauded 'Plays the Music of Twin Peaks', collaborated with Mitski on a song for an upcoming John Cameron Mitchell film, composed music for art installations by Danh Vo, recorded an album with Merzbow and scored an experimental reworking of the Mozart opera, 'The Magic Flute'. All of this frantic, external activity lead to a softly damaged dreaminess and broadened intent that has not been heard before in other Xiu Xiu works.

The album was produced by John Congleton (Blondie, Sigur Ros), Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu's own Angela Seo. It features guest appearances by fabled minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, L.A. Banjee Ball superstar commentator Enyce Smith, Swans guitar virtuoso Kristof Hahn and legendary drag artist and personal hero of Xiu Xiu, Vaginal Davis.

Standout track, "Wondering" is one of the catchiest boogie pop gems in the Xiu Xiu catalog, but like much of 'FORGET', it still bears an underlying tension that manifests differently in each piece. From the haunted guitar duet of "Petite", the hilariously fraught lyrics of "Get Up," the advanced industrial boxing match of "Jenny GoGo," or the experimental goth explosion of "Faith, Torn Apart", all the songs, in their own ways, build to a roiling boil of a fate in vanishing.

The calligraphy on the cover translates literally to "we forget." It bows to the universality of everything and everyone's inevitable decline and foggy disappearance. Regarding the album title, Xiu Xiu singer Jamie Stewart said, "To forget uncontrollably embraces the duality of human frailty. It is a rebirth in blanked out renewal but it also drowns and mutilates our attempt to hold on to what is dear." 'FORGET' is both the palliative fade out of a traumatic's past but also the trampling pain of a beautiful one's decay.