Xiu Xiu 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips
Join us for an exciting performance of 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, the newest record by experimental rock band Xiu Xiu
Xiu Xiu
13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips
with Marc Kate
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Doors: 7PM
All Ages
Standing Performance
View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.
About the Record
“I did not join a rock and roll band to play rock and roll!” – Blixa Bargeld, on quitting The Bad Seeds
“My name is Blixa Bargeld. And I’m here for my COMPUTER!” – Also Blixa Bargeld, when picking up said computer from a computer store in Berlin where Xiu Xiu now resides
There’s a dance, and on occasion a place to go dancing, where we while away the inevitable in the distinct hopes that we can better embrace what’s left of clocks that only run one way. You see, time is the issue and the issue is all about doing a dance that measures out life, and chance, and smooths the groove into something that can comfortably be swallowed.
Like 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips?
Precisely like 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips. Which, on the face of it is the newest record from Xiu Xiu, but only on the face of it. Underneath that face, the sinews and struggles of a need that seeks to name itself over every record, and every song on every record, ever written by Xiu Xiu of course, but also anyone who ever sought to make a record that’s worth a good goddamned. And this record is precisely that.
That is: a good goddamned. Nine songs of it, in fact. Nine songs to seal the deal for those who will still listen to all nine songs, in order, because an album is a message that can’t be read piecemeal. Mixed by John Congleton with a band-directed dictum that he should feel free to both “go crazy” and if there was ever any doubt as to what that meant please, by all means “choose iconoclasm.”
Which, if your ears are not liars, he has very specifically done. Even if it was not that heavy of a lift to do so since Xiu Xiu has made doing so their raison d’etre for the better part of forever. Formally formalized here under Xiu Xiu’s sense that “the destruction of an original aesthetic notion as a motivation was new for us.”
Were it also a marching order for anyone committing to actualizing a musical experience of some significance, it seems we’d all be a lot better off. Or at least feeling a lot better off. Which in the end is the only measurement that matters in the face of lives of weighty import. Or even lightweight frivolity. It’s there and everywhere in-between.
And while it sounds like in a volitional sense something easy to do, doing so song after song on record after record doesn’t always clarify or make things easy. Something driven home on their song “Veneficium,” a word with Latin roots connected to poisoning potions.
This record though, it must be said, sounds (and feels) like it does care about you. A sense that might mask the randomness of our place in space or more completely, sets it off as the true face of all of our public endeavors.
Beyond that? Songs like “Common Loon,” “Arp Omni,” and “T.D.F.T.W.” tip the scales toward a dangerous kind of listening experience. One that both takes a lot, but gives more, in almost equal measure.
Something set off by Xiu Xiu when they say, as they do, that if they want us to feel anything for this record, it would be “unafraid.”
Damned straight. We’ve had our fill of that shit lately, and if Xiu Xiu’s move to Berlin is any indication – “we wanted to stay ahead of disaster this time” – it is no less important of a thing than anything else we measure life and death with.
So, 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips?
Yes, 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips. While regret is for children and old people, rest assured that if you’re not one, you’ll be the other. And out of the long laundry list of things on your regret list, you will most definitely not find 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips. It’s a mitzvah. For what we should be well pleased.
You are alive. And, oh yeah, long live Xiu Xiu.
–Eugene S. Robinson, East Palo Alto, California
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About the Artist
![Xiu Xiu](https://i0.wp.com/grayarea.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/images.png?fit=225%2C225&ssl=1)
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.
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Marc Kate
Originally trained as a filmmaker and visual artist, San Francisco based producer and composer Marc Kate applies cinematic and conceptual approaches to music and audio production.
As a response to the tech culture assault on San Francisco (and the world), Kate takes up the tools of the trade — computers and synthesis — and slyly counter-attacks, imbuing humanity precisely where humanity is being evacuated. He creates a counterpoint to tech’s speed and greed — slow, immersive, materialist, drifting.
But Kate also draws from his history in San Francisco’s synth-punk and techno scenes, emerging to create stripped-down, static experiments in synthesis.
He leads the electronic post-punk band Never Knows and has released solo material on over two dozen labels including Jacktone, Loöq, Air Texture and Dragon’s Eye Recordings and his own imprints Untitled & After and Failing Forms. In 2018, he formed the Synth Doom project My Heart, an Inverted Flame with drummer Andee Connors.
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