Xiu Xiu

Xiu Xiu goes record shopping at Amoeba Hollywood in this "What's In My Bag?" episode. Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo, and David Kendrick talk about the Cocteau Twins' goth bass lines, psychedelic music from around the world, avant-garde and classical composers & lots more. Eraserhead Xiu Xiu, their new album interpreting David Lynch's debut film Eraserhead, is out now via Polyvinyl Records.

Xiu Xiu's picks:
• Broadcast, The Focus Group - Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (LP) 
• Cocteau Twins - Garlands (LP) 
• John Robb - The Art Of Darkness (BOOK) 
• Vaughn Williams - A London Symphony (CD) 
• Tom Zé - Brazil Classics Vol. 5: The Hips Of Tradition (CD) 
• Various - Tokyo Flashback P.S.F. - Psychedelic Speed Freaks (LP) 
• OSEES - Abomination Revealed At Last (LP) 
• Morton Feldman - Clarinet & String Quartet (CD) 
• George Crumb - Ancient Voices Of Children (LP) 
• George Crumb - An Idyll For The Misbegotten (CD) 
• Jóhann Jóhannsson - The Miners' Hymns (CD) 
• Echo & The Bunnymen - Songs To Learn & Sing (CD) 
• Mary Jane Hooper - Psychedelphia (CD) 
• Andwellas Dream - Love & Poetry (LP) 
• Otis Redding - The Very Best Of Otis Redding (CD) 
• Sam V. H. Reese (Editor) - The Notebooks Of Sonny Rollins (BOOK) 

Featured Artist: Xiu Xiu

Editor: Jacob Gray
Executive Producer: Rachael McGovern
Producer/Director: Craig Miller
Assistant Director: Derich Heath
Cameras: Aaron Araki, Derich Heath
Audio Recorded by: Patrick Emswiler
Assistant Editor: Patrick Emswiler

Watch Xiu Xiu's "What's In My Bag?" episode on Amoeba.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hi, I'm Angela.

SPEAKER_03 0:01

Hi, I'm Jamie from Shushu. And David from Shushu. Angela's also in Shushu.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

And this is What's in My Baghus?

SPEAKER_04 0:31

Well, I was happy to find a new vinyl version of a group called Broadcast, and the record is Witch Cults of the Radio Age, which touches all that hauntology stuff for me and folklore. And it's an album, there's like 30 songs on it, and every track is there's too much stuff in it, but it's over the top is these gorgeous melodic singing, but it's really like your mind is just zipping from place to place. And despite the focus group, it sounds kind of out of focus and hazy at times. I so I'm really curious to hear it on a turntable.

SPEAKER_03 1:27

I think kind of for all of mine, I got a a little backward-looking as opposed to forward looking. Starting with Garlands by Kat Cha Twins. When I was a teenager, I started getting into as teenagers do, getting into goth, which I have never stopped being into. But I was also learning to play bass at the time, and this is possibly the best example of goth bass playing I have ever heard. It's incredibly romantic, incredibly rhythmic. The feel is is wonderful, the note choices are very, very unusual, but still ultra compelling.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Is there a particular song on there that uh Wax and Wayne?

SPEAKER_03 2:32

Oh my god, if you watch the word!

SPEAKER_02 2:43

I think maybe we'll continue that. I got this book. The Art of Darkness.

SPEAKER_06 2:53

The art of darkness has been with us for centuries because every generation has got to deal with its blues. What was once expressed in art, architecture, romantic literature, and painting was in the post-punk wars, a Sumerian alternative culture creating its own dark narrative whilst accelerating away from the big bang of punk.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

It's written by John Robb. Uh, interviews with Susie and the Banshee, Sukir, Dan, Nikki, Sonnen Descolt, Neubauten, Bauhaus. It seems cool. I've been getting more into actually reading about music. I've kind of avoided it for a really long time because it was I had for a long time like I want to listen to the music. I don't want to know about the person who made it because musicians. We don't need to say anything negative, but I just didn't want to know. But I am getting a lot out more lately getting into it, and um just hearing about not just the musicians, but the world and the environment and everything else that was going on around them and how that really influences uh the music that comes out, and that way it also makes me a little more accepting of uh musicians as human beings, you know. So yeah, I'm gonna check this one out.

SPEAKER_06 4:13

It was dark music like a dance to it, you know, which is uh probably one of the best equations ever. Darkness gives it a like a heavy heavyweight, I don't know, it gives it an emotional cloud. And it's I'm not it's naturally it's gonna be dark, it's when we live in an incumbent place and everyone's got a movie. It's not like everyone goes in a room and it's gonna go it's all about the weather. It just kind of into it, you know, and it's uh and all that and it's and it's attractive and when you embrace it, it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 4:39

We're kind of picking up on the scene idea, music-wise, like for rock, so many things started with uh like ten or fifteen people somewhere, and there were two or three uh bands that really mattered. But that was actually true in classical music to a degree. I love uh uh Von Williams as a composer. All the English composers mind uh folk music for a long time. And then he kind of discovered the 20th century and and serialism, atonal stuff, and he did kind of a conceptual piece about folk and countryside crashing into modern day London. So there's so he wrote the London Symphony, and it it kind of uh takes on both sides, so it's very calm and pleasant, and then there's passages where there's the chaos and turmoil of modern life and the city all in one.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

Oh, cool. Uh Tom Zay. Uh it's a Brazilian composer, uh but an avant-garde, experimental Brazilian composer. So he he did and continues to put together traditional like 60s tropicalia Brazilian music and 70s Brazilian music, but also we'll use uh elements of musique concrete and noise and avant-garde music.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

The idea of uh combining classic types of songwriting with unusual sounds, uh he's he's the absolute master at the psychedelic speech freaks box set so I mean they put out a lot of like experimental underground Japanese artists like Kiji Haino and the acid Murder Temple It started from this guy, Hideo Ikizumi. He started from a modern music record store, which was like long time Tokyo Underground Music Store, and then just kind of started putting up people he liked and the music he liked. And there's a box set now, so I'm excited.

SPEAKER_04 7:58

I have to admit I'm kind of partial to bands that keep going and still mean something and never seem to hit a like creative peak, and they keep delving around and changing that up in a little bit. And OCs are one of those groups for sure. They're not particularly flashy or anything, but it's just they keep churning it out, and the current setup is is pretty great, so I just love keeping up with them and they're really nice guys too. Great cover, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:49

Warren Feldman, a good old Uncle Mort, my number one favorite avant-garde composer. Maybe my favorite musician, top three for sure. I probably listen to more Morton Feldman than any other music. Minimalist Composer started in the 70s. It is incredibly interesting to listen to his later works, uh, knowing that he is dying while he's writing the most beautiful and longest pieces that he had ever written. I'm very much looking forward to hearing this one. Very, very beautiful, very, very sad, very disturbing, and always uh evocative and interesting.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

I got um George Crumb two. One is the vinyl ancient voice ancient voices of children. The other is an I don't know how to pronounce this I idol, ideal for the misbegotten I don't know only two crumb albums that was available, so I'd pick it up. Free and wild, but incredibly structured at the same time approach to composition, um making pieces for piano and how he really uses the whole piano. And also like his scores are beautiful. I think there's maybe a little example of it. A lot of those works, they're like both visual, but not like too abstract, they're actually very concrete, but still take on its form and shape. And like I just printed a bunch of them out and I'll have them around just to like look at sometimes. So I'm really looking forward to hearing these two albums.

SPEAKER_04 11:38

Uh, Jonas Johansson. He did very dense compositions, very kind of monolithic and often very beautiful, but just there's a lot of propulsive energy and and there was a lot of chaos and stuff in his personal life, which ended up not great, but um he for a lot of years he channeled it into pretty meaningful moving modern music.

SPEAKER_03 12:34

We'll see what we get. Oh cool, echo in the Buddyman song to learn and saying.

SPEAKER_05 12:42

Up it games to win through the thicketh.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

This is a best of of theirs from I think it came out in the ear early early mid-80s. It never fails to blow my brains out how throughout my entire life, how moved I am by hearing uh The Killing Moon and Bring on the Dancing Horses, two of the most oh I don't I don't want to overuse the word beautiful, but they're incredibly, incredibly beautiful, sad, dark pop songs.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Take it while you'll break it while you'll rent the pop.

SPEAKER_03 13:30

Kind of going back and forth between being very understated and very subtle, and then kind of suddenly ultra-dense and explosive and melodramatic but in a very sincere way. It also, as uh the years tick by sadly, it always blows my mind that they were like 23 when they like wrote these incredible masterpieces, uh it which is sometimes very inspiring and in sometimes incredibly dispiriting for me personally. Uh, but uh I don't know. I'm just thanks.

SPEAKER_05 14:02

It is You'll make it yet.

SPEAKER_03 14:03

I love the opportunity to be moved by the same pieces of music through you know more than half of my life.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

Uh this is a wild horse. Uh Senna Fletcher Piquet, Mary Jane Hooper, Psychedelphia from the Vault of Scram Records. Um, it's funk from uh New Orleans from 1966 to 1970. I just thought and sometimes you're just browsing and you see the cover and you're kind of like drawn to it, the vibe, the what it's telling you, you're like, oh yeah, and then it's also you got the staff pick on it, and you're like, well, if Roman recommends it.

SPEAKER_03 15:04

Those who know know.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

Well, thanks Roman. I'll tell you how it is.

SPEAKER_04 15:14

I'm uh in an endless psychedelic wormhole, and I love the effect that it had on kind of all types of music for a really short amount of time, and no record companies had any idea what to do with it. And for 18 months or so, it was really free-form, and people suddenly you didn't want to write it just about dating or uh falling in love. Anything was open. And Ireland had a couple of weird, very um kind of literary things of it in this group called Anduela's Dream. Uh, this album goes buried by the record company, I think. They did one before this. And I'm partial to concept records or it's thematic linkage. And so this one was just a crazy dream. So you go through 12 uh versions of parts of the dream. Some people done away if you mention the name of I'm happy so much stuff gets released again. That's one of the great things, cyclical good things about pop culture and pop artists, it's not lost forever.

SPEAKER_03 16:34

Alright, speaking of great voices and also best of Otis Writing, this is a best of, but oh my god, what a best of. Every single song is mind-bogglingly great. So I'm just gonna sit on the doppelb, watching the tie rolling. Emotional, funky, soulful. Also, adorably, my my sister is also a big Otis Writing fan. And another Stax Record artist, Carla Thomas, and her dad, Rufus Thomas, they actually had the first hit on Stax Records. Otis did a duet with her called Tramp, which is very funny. They're basically just talking shit to each other. Every Christmas, my sister and I will sing the song to each other. We're white, so we sing it like white people, so it's not even as gross as it could be.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

You know what, Otis? I don't care what you say, you're still a tramp. That's right. You haven't even got a fat bankroll in your pocket.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

I got the notebooks of Sonny Rollins.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

I like to play and let the crowd settle, and then lol, and then wake them up with something outrageous. Which diminishes what you play so that just when they begin to lose interest, I shock them back to reality and start thinking music rather than observing crowd. The reality of me, me and my sound, my communication through ancient ritual sound.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

For the obvious reasons, he recently passed, and it would be really nice to like have this copy. I read it a long time ago, and I don't know if I fully understood some of the stuff he was talking about. I've been getting a little more a bit more into jazz too, just like old classic, like Miles Davis culture and jazz too. Largely because I just finished a book by James Kaplan, Do Shades of Blue, which was kind of goes to the kind of blue the album and the artist involved in it. Sonny Walnuts was like a big part of that scene, and I'm at a nice place like rediscovering jazz. Thank you guys so much.

SPEAKER_03 18:55

Oh, thanks.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Yeah, really appreciate you coming in and talking with us today. Thanks for having me. It's nice from this view too, because now I'm seeing all these things on top, and I was like, what's that? This is a good view. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 19:07

Wow.