Xiu Xiu on How Switchblades, Blixa Bargeld, the Roland CR-68, and More Inspired Their New Album ‘13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips’

Immune to redundancy, LA-turned-Berlin experimental trio Xiu Xiu follow last year’s death-industrial nightmare Ignore Grief with yet another reinvention. Named after one of the world’s largest switchblades (which frontperson Jamie Stewart owns two of), 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips is a stampede of gritty excess. The record opens with ‘Arp Omni’, an airy and orchestral lovesick ambient piece. Stewart croons with heart-on-your-sleeve frankness, humbled in the face of a freckled lover. The song recalls early Xiu Xiu confessionals like ‘Ian Curtis Wishlist’ or ‘Sad Redux-O-Grapher’.  As the strings swell towards climax, a barrage of distorted noise cascades in. For the rest of its tracklist, 13” eschews the ethereal sentimentality of its overture, reborn as something brash and delicious.

In our conversation, Stewart mentions Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. The band’s miracle sophomore record is a perfect reference point: a defiantly abrasive and misanthropic work that’s simultaneously danceable and addictive; Trent Reznor’s industrial, gutter-scraping suicidal fantasies became Billboard hits. A similar contradiction hovers over 13”. Both raw and painstakingly detailed, the album conjures a feverish séance of distortion-overloaded maximalism. Yet simultaneously, it’s the most thoroughly pop-ish Xiu Xiu record in ages.

13” is a kinky labyrinth of hazy dreamworlds and volcanic desires. Most of its nine songs offer economic pop structures, infectious riffs, and catchy choruses. Noise rock and synth punk aesthetics coalesce into meticulously calibrated chaos. Arsenals of synths fire from all directions. Sounds toss across the stereo mix with the aerodynamic mobility of a dropkicked Looney Tunes character. This is the most grandiose Xiu Xiu’s sounded. ‘Veneficium’ begins like a Goblin euro-horror score, ‘T.D.F.T.W.’ is unrelenting, fuzz-overdosed art-punk, ‘Piña, Coconut & Cherry’ concludes as a guttural wail of skin-peeling yearnings, bellowed over meowing arps.

In our conversation, Stewart spoke about some of the album’s eclectic influences, including switchblades, Blixa Bargeld, and the Pandora’s Box of self-conscious iconoclasm. It quickly became evident that 13” is a question mark for the band: a record they feel tremendous uncertainty about. Every avenue of reflection births news contradictions for Stewart. It’s a delight to see a musician twenty-two years deep into their project still baffled by the sounds that sputter out of them.

Moving from LA to Berlin

You and Angela moved to Berlin a year or two ago.

About a year-and-a-half ago, October 2022.

How did this migration influence the new record?

Berlin didn’t influence it so much but not being in LA did. I didn’t expect to miss it as much as I do. I assumed moving to Berlin would feel like a clean start, but it felt like adjusting to a different set of problems, which then made me feel like there’s nowhere good in the world and every place is a fucking drag [laughs]. Adjusting to an unexpected sense of loss influenced this record quite a bit. Not directly in the lyrics, but certainly in our mindsets while finishing it. We did half in LA and half in Berlin. I felt very confused making this record even though the songs are relatively straightforward. But I don’t think inserting confusion in aesthetic situations is a bad thing.

Is that confusion unique for you or do you usually enter Xiu Xiu records with a sense of clarity?

I’ve never finished a record and felt confused by what it is. Usually when it’s done, we have a fairly clear conception of what it was supposed to be and whether we succeeded. I think it’ll always be ambiguous. I’m not hoping to have it clarified. I feel slightly uneasy, like we fucked it up somehow by not having a clear handle. But I want to lean into that unease and see where it can take us.

I was also thinking about the practicality of relocating your artistic practice to the other side of the globe. I imagine over the years of Xiu Xiu, you and Angela have both amassed an extensive inventory of instruments and pedals and whatnot. Did you have to ship all your equipment to Berlin? Or did you part with some of it?

It was a much bigger pain in the ass than I thought it’d be! We had five or six unwieldy vintage keyboards which we didn’t think would survive the move. We gave them away or sold them. There’s one I feel really sad about still. But interestingly, I sold it to somebody who ended up selling it to somebody who Angela’s friends with, completely by chance. So it’s still in the folds. Someone we both like is using it, which makes us happy. We were able to take our very big gong collection. We sold a lot of outboard gear and a couple guitars. All the guitars and amps we left here, since we’re here to tour. We probably took 60% of our stuff but it took an unfathomable amount of time to pack and unpack. Then we had to move it from our apartment to the studio. Our studio isn’t at home, which is new for us.

Is it different working in a studio where you have a separation between workspace and homespace?

Yah. I didn’t think I’d like it because we’ve always had a home studio, and I really appreciated dipping in and out all day. But apartments in Berlin are really small and it’s an incredibly densely populated city. We couldn’t find a place that allowed for that. Then, in an incredible stroke of luck, an engineer I know who works with Einstürzende Neubauten had space in his studio he was looking to rent. It’s worked out incredibly well. I’ve never worked in a place that was completely and totally quiet all the time. I had no idea what I was missing. It’s nice when the day is done to go home and pursue other things, beyond plugging things in or unplugging things, adjusting this knob by 0.1% to see if it suddenly makes the song better — which it does not!

Switchblades

In LA, me and Angela lived in a normal family-sized house. It was just the two of us so we had a lot of space to collect things. I started collecting switchblades a few years ago. When we moved to Berlin, we knew we wouldn’t have space so we got rid of almost every collection. One of them I did not get rid of was the switchblade collection.

Like many people, I have a fascination with violence and “tough guy” aesthetics. In no way am I a tough guy. I’d certainly eschew most kinds of violence entirely. But the aesthetics, narratives, and imagery behind it is really compelling. Switchblades, since the 1950s, are an almost clichéd symbol of “tough guy” aesthetics. But as an instrument of violence, they’re pretty useless. They’re like the worst knife you can fight with. They fold up, the blades are too thin, they break. You can cut somebody but if you were in a knife fight it’s still the last knife you’d want. Serving as a symbol for violence and fear while being pretty useless is a fascinating symbol of violence generally. The idea of interesting uselessness was an underlying drive for this record. Not that we tried to make something useless, but the idea of a stupid contradiction that could have genuine consequences interested us.

With the last several records, we always have—this is a horrible word to use—talismans that guide us in ways we don’t understand or necessarily want to. These objects sit around the studio or at our desks or whatever. Switchblades were some of those. That’s why we titled the record after a specific one.

Do you find yourself talking a lot about these guiding objects? Or do they more just haunt your subconscious?

Generally, they’re not discussed. They’re just around. Because this is the first record where we’ve referenced it very specifically [in the title], we’re left having to explain them even if we can’t, which is not the best PR move. [laughs] Angela and I don’t have 100% correlation on visual ideas or aesthetics, but we are interested in a lot of the same things.

What were some of the objects influencing previous records?

Good question. For Girl with Basket of Fruit, Angela took over the dining room table with corny occult items. She has a collection of things like that, but she’d never laid them out in a clear way. She did a triptych of videos for that record and the objects seemed like some kind of map to determine what the visual-narrative arc for the videos would be. With Ignore Grief, it was a lot of books about medieval religious art. We were seeing every possible museum exhibit on that, and when we moved to Europe we were like, “We’re in the heart of religious art!” It ramped up crazily. With OH NO, I was getting obsessed with troll dolls with rainbow hair. A candy collection got really out of control. A couple other things too.

How many switchblades do you own?

Twenty? Not an insane number but a healthy quantity. I just have the James Dean kind. The Italian, Corsican, and Sicilian types are the ones I like most.

That’s a respectable amount in case you ever get into a skirmish.

I mean, only with my own ego. [laughs] Like I said, they’re the dumbest knife you can fight with.

Fuzz Pedals

We’re using them incessantly on this album! Plus, we got some really cool ones we hadn’t had before which was fun. It wasn’t so much different in how we used them, but how exhaustively we used them. We’ve used blown-out sounds since we started. Almost everything sounds better with a fuzz pedal.

It’s interesting hearing this album after Ignore Grief: a very harsh and often unpalatable sounding record. I, of course, use unpalatable as praise.

“Unpalatable” I take as a goal. [laughs]

This is also an album with harsh, distorted sounds. But it’s a completely different kind of distortion. It’s more rock-ish and digestible. What was your approach towards using distorted sounds to make something more structured and… fun?

There wasn’t a whole lot of thought behind it other than: any time we blew something up more it sounded better. It’s something people do on records all the time, but we’d never gone, “what if there’s two fuzz pedals? How about we turn them up all the way instead of halfway?” Just having no dynamic range whatsoever and letting sound be decimated by itself.

Roland CR-68

On Angel Guts: Red Classroom, we used a bunch of late-70s and early-80s pre-program preset drum machines. We didn’t have the CR-68 at the time, but I really wanted one. Ten in the Swear Jar, the band I was in briefly before Xiu Xiu, did one song with a Maestro prefab drum machine. I really loved it but was borrowing it from someone we’d recently fired. He very much insisted we return it, which was not unfair. Other than that, we never used [pre-program drum machines]. But I never fell out of love with them. They always sound a little burnt-down, they’re never totally in time. But they also tend to be really funky. Whoever programmed these eons ago definitely had a sense of what a groove was. Which is the opposite of what you’d assume for something like this.

To clarify, the CR-68, unlike the CR-78, isn’t programmable. It’s all presets?

The only thing you can do is turn the fills on or off and determine what bar they happen or don’t happen. You can pick the fill, but you can’t program it. Angela bought me the CR-68 as a congratulations gift when we finished Ignore Grief. I’d wanted one for a million years, mostly because they looked really cool. They’re a cube, the buttons are all red and blue and yellow and green. I like rainbow trolls; I’m a sucker for colours. With the CR-78, you can program. It’s a very expensive and coveted drum machine. I appreciate this one as a stupider, less cool younger sibling of the very cool one. I wanted to see what we could make with a device that looks almost identical to the cooler one but was 1/10 of the price and nobody cares about. I was immediately delighted with it! If we could have a viable music career only recording the sound of the Roland CR-68 and making hundreds of records of just that, I’d be intensely satisfied. But I’d probably be the only person in the world who would be. If you open one up, I’m sure it’s filled with dust or dead crickets or something. It felt strange to fall in love with this little thing, but we probably used it on half the record.

Angel Guts was an album where you chose the equipment beforehand and had a very restricted list of what you’d use. It seems like your love of the CR-68 is a love of limitations. Does it help you to restrict yourself?

Very definitely. Since Angel Guts, we’ve found it incredibly productive to determine our limitations before we start a record or very soon into it. We’ve done it with every record. After we finished 13”, we tried writing new stuff without limitations. So far it’s been a total failure.

David Kendrick joined Xiu Xiu as your drummer for the last record. What was your collaboration like on 13”?

Unfortunately, we didn’t work together as much as I’d like since we moved. But he played every song with live drums. He wrote probably ¼ of the lyrics.

Liminal Spaces

Actually, that’s a David contribution. I’d never even heard the phrase before. It’s the idea of literal or figurative in-between spaces, within consciousness, within [physical] space, between dimensions or political/social structures. Lyrics, like it or not, have a beginning, middle, or end. Regardless of how you write them, they’re a finite structure. You start at one point and end at another. A liminal space is the opposite of that. It was interesting to get lyrics from David trying to deal with the idea of liminal spaces within a constrained, finite structure. I think that’s why this record is still confusing to me. We’re attempting to pursue ideas which, because you can’t participate in or know, are impossible to understand.

It’s interesting to think of this as a record informed by liminality because it’s a much more structured album than Ignore Grief.

That’s why it’s pretty confusing to us. They’re pretty normal songs. But for us, personally, how they arrived or what they mean is confusing.

It’s sort of like a Xiu Xiu pop record.

That’s not unfair. The songs have choruses in the place where you expect the chorus to be. [laughs]

There’s fun guitar riffs…

I don’t know how the fuck that happened!

Blixa Bargeld

Can you tell me the story about Blixa picking up his computer that’s referenced in the press release?

Eugene Robinson [of Oxbow] put that in there. I don’t know anything about it! I sent him a Blixa quote from a documentary I saw, then he added the computer thing. A friend of his saw Blixa walking into a computer store and say, [stern-voiced Blixa impression] “I’m Blixa Bargeld. I am here for my computer!”

Neubauten’s one of my favourite bands and has been since I was a teenager. They played the best show I’ve seen in my entire life. As I mentioned earlier, we’re sharing a studio with them completely by chance. I never see them, but we have a calendar for when we’re both there. It’s fascinating and bizarre to go into a space where I’ve seen them working in live videos and go, “Oh fuck, now we work here?”

We started working on this record, under David’s suggestion, as a psych-rock record: something he’s really into but I’ve never explored. Then, I was watching this Nick Cave documentary and learned that when Blixa quit The Bad Seeds, he allegedly yelled, “I didn’t join a rock ’n’ roll band to play rock ‘n’ roll!” Not long after, we were playing a show in LA. Ignore Grief isn’t a rock ‘n’ roll record in any way. But because we’d started working on this new record, the tour’s arrangements unconsciously became rock ‘n’ roll-based. Ezra Buchla, a musician friend of mine, looked at me and went, “Huh… rock ‘n’ roll…” and walked away. I’d just heard this Blixa quote and went, “What the fuck are we doing? I’ve never been interested in rock ‘n’ roll! I didn’t grow up listening to it! I’m not a rock ‘n’ roll person! What are we doing making a rock ‘n’ roll record?” But we liked the songs. Like you said they’re… soooorta fun, which makes me wanna barf. There’s kooky guitar shit. So essentially: Blixa’s quote opened that Pandora’s Box of blurriness. We became dedicated to doing the best job we could in an aesthetic form we had no dedication to.

As I understand, Blixa—for the last several years of The Bad Seeds—felt split between the increasingly stadium rock sound of the band and what he wanted to continue doing with Neubauten. Do you ever feel pressure to make art with more accessible appeal versus more abrasive or esoteric work?

Not at all. We’re not that big a band so there’s not that much at stake about what we do or don’t do. One of my favourite bands of all time is OMB [Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark]. They’re one of the most adorable synth-pop bands ever. They even admitted they tried to be more art-y and weird but that’s just what naturally comes out of them. But also [Krzysztof] Penderecki is one of my favourite composers, and that’s some of the most punishing music of all time. Internally, those things aren’t at odds for us at all. Over the last few years, it’s just by chance that we’ve started doing one record that’s more songs-based and another that’s more far-out. It was never by design, it was a reaction to what we were interested in musically.

What’s your favourite Neubauten album?

I’m really bad at picking favourites. Their new one is super good. They’ve been on fire lately. On the last one, the first track ‘Ten Grand Goldie’ was one of my favourite songs they’ve ever done. It’s really exciting that for forty years they’ve continued to be challenging and weird. We’ve been around for twenty years so it’s inspiring to see a band twice as old still kicking themselves in the ass to evolve.

Iconoclasm

John Congleton mixed the album. He’s a record producer, mix engineer, a good friend of mine, and someone I’ve learned a lot from about music from a technical and philosophical standpoint. A couple years ago, I was doing a short course about experimental music for Atlas Obscura. For part of the course, I was interviewing different musicians. I was interviewing John and asked him which records particularly inspired him. One of them was Nine Inch Nails’ Downward Spiral. I asked him what he loved about it, and he said it seemed like every musical decision was iconoclastic. It is such a weird record and completely baffling to me how it became a Top 40 record. There’s some jams on there but a lot of it’s super brutal, pure noise, and the subject is pretty hideous and unforgiving. It’s constantly unrooting scriptures.

The idea of iconoclasm and musical ideas wasn’t something I’d really thought of until John mentioned it. Being consciously fearless about unraveling something aesthetic almost ruins it. It becomes nonspontaneous and then accidentally institutionalized because you have decided, “I am the coolest kid on the block because I have destroyed this idea”. But at the same time, being afraid to destroy ideas completely ruins the possibility of doing something bold enough to be meaningful.

I was reading about the folk singer Diane Cluck, who was classically trained for over a decade on piano, but she talks about how she needed to become unschooled and trust her intuition to make good music and reclaim lost instincts.

Yah, yah!

How do you actually strike that balance between being iconoclastic but not doing it too deliberately?

That’s the rub. It’s definitely the goal to be able to do that: to be iconoclastic in a pure way without it being a pose. Being aware of the obvious connection between iconoclasm and music has made it more complicated for me; it took something I was comfortable doing in an unconscious way and made it conscious. The solution is not thinking about it anymore. But trying not to think about something is the least constructive way to stop thinking about something. I don’t know, I guess we’ll see how the next record goes. The intrusion has definitely been made while we were making this record. Not in a bad way, but it was a disruptive element. We had to deal with it daily in the studio.

You said the ideal would be not to think about it, which is an impossibility. Do you think the best artistic practice is to turn off the analytical part of your brain and act on impulse?

For me, it definitely is. I don’t think analytical thought prevents good art from happening. And I don’t think impulsive thought makes good art happen. But I know when I’m doing something and working in an impulsive way, I’m much happier with the results in retrospect. But Ellsworth Kelly’s one of my favourite artists, and he’s one of the most pointed, staid artists there is! There’s no way he’s doing any of that work on impulse.

One last unrelated question: is the Masahiro Shinoda film the namesake for ‘Pale Flower’?

Damn girl, you know your movies! [laughs] Yes it is! The song and movie have nothing to do with each other. I watched it, and when you open Pro Tools you have to call a song something. A lot of times it’ll be whatever’s on mind. Sometimes we’ll keep those titles. Sometimes we’ll come up with a real title. This is really nerdy but I love how they edited all the parts with the cards [in Pale Flower]. It’s so energetic. The cards appeal to my collector’s impulse also; they’re small, they all look like something particular, you can stack them up, arrange them in interesting ways. It’s both a fortunate and unfortunate part of human art history that there are periods where things are magical. And that period of Japanese filmmaking is absolutely magical. I’ve probably seen the movie five times, and I never get tired of it.

It’s a very Xiu Xiu-y movie. It’s all about death-drives and self-destructive lusts. But there’s also a lot of extreme-close-ups of knives…

That’s true! You have a good eye, I didn’t think about that.

Maybe it leaked into your subconscious!

Ha ha ha, clearly!

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. 

Xiu Xiu’s 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips is out September 27 via Polyvinyl.