Xiu Xiu
Eraserhead Xiu Xiu
Polyvinyl Record Co.
Thursday, October 8, 2026
7:30 PM Doors
21+
Standing
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Eraserhead Xiu Xiu
Eraserhead Xiu Xiu is a new live concert, film, and album that channels the darkness, strangeness, and emotional intensity of Lynch’s film through sound collage, handmade instruments, vocals, and experimental electronics.
In 2016, with the blessing of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Xiu Xiu released and toured the surprisingly successful album and concert, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks. Out of respect and deference to the beloved series, the band decided to put the concert to rest in 2018. After the recent and untimely passing of David Lynch, Xiu Xiu began to receive several high-profile requests to revive their interpretation of this iconic music. However, in wanting to always try to follow, honor, and continue to be inspired by the incredibly high bar of artistic challenge set by David Lynch, Xiu Xiu is instead going deeper.
Eraserhead Xiu Xiu is a new live concert with accompanying film & full-length album that uses field recordings, concert specific homemade instruments, organ, modular synths, vocals, flashlights, electrical interference, and elements of musique concrete to express the bizarre emotionality, conflicted sexuality, relentless darkness, and singularly unsettled moonscape of this most incredible of midnight masterpieces. The album itself is a masterpiece in sound collage and experimentation, with tracks like “Tetra” and “Sleep Synth” shifting from minimal auditory sensations to a clobbering, grotesque cacophony. The album’s closing track, “In Heaven,” is a beautiful rendition of Peter Ivers’ original composition, with Stewart’s delicate and soft vocals showcasing the elegance and wonder found on Lynch’s directorial-debut.
Eraserhead’s original sound design and score by Alan Splet and Lynch guide Xiu Xiu’s expanded interpretation, reflecting their influence as fans and musicians. The original film gives birth to Xiu Xiu's visual lens through which to be baffled and pummeled by the band's imaginary unused auxiliary footage.
Is it a short term art installation, an exploded tribute to a cinematic triumph, epitaph to an idol, via an entirely new work? YES. Is it intense, odd, curious, and shrouded in the gloomiest of nights? OF COURSE. After all, it is Eraserhead.
About the Artists
Xiu Xiu
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.
