Xiu Xiu with Jakob Battick

The indelible experimental rock outfit led by Jamie Stewart returns to SPACE with longtime member Angelo Seo and new member David Kendrick (of Devo, Sparks, and Gleaming Spires).

Ignore Grief is a record of halves.

Angela Seo sings on half of the record. Jamie Stewart sings on half of the record.

Half of the songs are experimental industrial. Half of the songs are experimental modern classical.

Half of it is real. Half of it is imaginary.

The real songs attempt to turn the worst life has offered to five people the band is connected with into some kind of desperate shape that does something, anything, other than grind and brutalize their hearts and memory within these stunningly horrendous experiences.

The imaginary songs are an expansion and abstract exploration of the early rock and roll “Teen Tragedy” genre as jumping off point to decontaminate the band’s own overwhelming emotions in knowing and living with what has happened to these five people.

What none of this record does and despite the oft repeated assertion, what Xiu Xiu has never done, is attempt to superficially shock the listener. Instead, Xiu Xiu has spent twenty years grappling with how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and to reorganize horror; there is no other word for it other than horror.

The motivation for writing Ignore Grief to be about a child who was sold into prostitution by his mother, a junior high student who was kidnapped and murdered, incessantly choosing alcohol and cocaine over one’s family, becoming lost in the bleakest, darkest aspects of cultish spirituality and committing suicide as means to escape and protest a life of violent sex work is because the members of Xiu Xiu themselves are deeply shocked.

Old friend and new member David Kendrick (Sparks, Devo, Gleaming Spires) joins Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart through whatever this may be and whatever it may mean and why ever it may have occurred. The point of aesthetic examination is to see if there is any way to come out the other side or if there is even any reason. In either case there may not be but to simply turn away would be yet a further act of destruction.

“I had now lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was the truly decisive incident of my life. I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came into contact with a human being.”
– Osamu Dazai

A spell to slow down time, a drawing back of the veil between worlds, the way that a song also contains multitudes. On October 6th, Maine-bred, Philadelphia-based songwriter Jakob Battick will be releasing Slow Motion Summer, their fourth and most radical album to date, via the Czech label Stoned to Death and Jakob’s own Lilien Hexen imprint. It’s a suite of songs written specifically to be slowed and ghosted to tape and back again via successive generations of manipulation and alchemy. This performance will be part of a string of shows along the East coast in celebration of the album’s release. These are occult hymns to the almighty moon, spun in the silk of spiders’ webs and cast upwards at the stars, anointed in blood from the goat’s hooves.