Upon hearing that Xiu Xiu would be playing a show at the Bowery Ballroom in my humble hometown New York City with the city’s noise son Prurient, my brain involuntarily winced, an appropriate reaction to a seemingly impossible paradox. Why would the tinnitus-inducing, power-electronics testosterone fest that is Prurient be matched up with the often effete, fractured tales of hurt and emotionally honest outpourings of Xiu Xiu? Was this some promoter’s idea of a joke? Even others I told all seemed to cock their head in disbelief.
But it all began to make sense. Xiu Xiu and Prurient, if you think about it, are actually an excellent pairing. Though Xiu Xiu find themselves consistently exploring a tender side that Dominick Fernow (Prurient) seemingly doesn’t possess, both use torrents of sound to explore the same recesses of psychic territory and emotional longings. They also both use their art as a cleansing ritual, and though they’ve developed their own divergent modes of purging the pain, neither is less harrowing. The twisted tales of Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart teem with a wretched beauty both as nauseating and as moving as the layered drones, tortured screams, and microphone feedback of Dominic Fernow. I braced myself for what could be one hell of a cathartic evening.
The heartache wouldn’t end there, though. Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista were later be added to the bill, and since my exposure to the group was minimal, I decided to ask my editor, Mr P, what he knew. Well, my fears of breaking down in emotional throes were only compounded as he informed me that Evangelista’s Hello Voyager was not only one of his favorite albums of the year, but another one of those dangerous acts whose purpose lies in the pouring out of emotion and transference to their unsuspecting audiences. After taking a listen to Hello Voyager, I became really excited for this show -- or terrified, depending on how you look at it.
Entering a sparsely populated Bowery Ballroom, I came upon openers Common Eider, King Eider -- the nom de plume of Rob Fisk (7 Year Rabbit Cycle, Deerhoof) -- mid-set. Immediately, the viola drones and guitar work reminded me of Lou Reed and John Cale working out a midnight Theater of the Eternal Music jam in Soho in the late ’60s. Their dronescapes had a less is more approach, creating trance-inducing moments along with greater moments of breakout glory and grandeur, kind of like a more minimal and sparse Silver Mt. Zion or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Though their set had its moments of tense foreboding, ultimately their music would be guilty of lulling everyone into a false sense of security, for Prurient was to take the stage next.
As the room started to fill out a bit, Fernow tested a few deafening squeals before the start of his set. My girlfriend turned to me to bemoan two things; first, that she didn’t bring ear plugs; and second, that Prurient was wearing a shirt. Shirt or not, his set was astonishing, and though it wasn’t as ear-splitting as I’ve witnessed in the past, it was one of the least abrasive (though it was still abrasive) and dare I say beautiful sets I’ve ever experienced from Prurient. The layered drones and distorted screams of agony were a perfect compliment to the theme of the night, i.e., the purging of pain. Prurient’s cries were marked with the black infinity of a Burzum album. Like a sputtering roman candle, Fernow created howling feedback with a microphone and a mini-amp. I’m not sure if what he performed was new material, but if so, it was promising, with less harsh noise and p.e. leanings and more of the black metal-tinted drone loops that made his Pleasure Ground album so memorable. It was all injected with an almost kosmische-influenced salute to the cosmos.
Evangelista was on next. Compiling a group comprised of the plodding bass of Tara Barnes, prepared sounds of electronics man Dominic Chas, the fractured drumming of Lisa Gamble, and orchestral swells provided by guests strings C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) and Okkyung Lee, Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista were absolutely stunning. Bozulich has admittedly used Evangelista as an outlet to overcome her innate shyness, and indeed engaging the audience is something she makes a conscious attempt to do every night she’s out there. In one of her signature stage moves, she put her arm around an unsuspecting audience member and began to powerfully coo in his ear. Choking out restrained bits of screeching guitar and walking around the stage spilling her guts in the confessional style she’s honed so well, Evangelista waded through the black mist of their signature chamber pop. Quiet moments would unsuspectingly gather gusts of wind and steam, creating the perfect spell-casting environ for Bozulich to spit her vitriolic venom through the tempest. At times throughout the set, Yeh would play his violin so furiously, the chalk residue that came off his violin made it look like the violin itself were smoking. For the epic closer “Hello Voyager,” Bozulich, in another patented act of engaging the audience, entered the crowd to deliver her message in a more intimate matter: “When there’s only one word left, one word that hasn’t dried on your parched lips, that word is love.” Amen, sister.
Finally there was Xiu Xiu. This would be my second time seeing the group this year, the first time being a bare-bones semi-acoustic set in the basement of a Lutheran church in Brooklyn, with only the accompaniment of drummer Ches Smith. So this would be my first time seeing Xiu Xiu in full-band form, and wow what a difference it made. The stage was setup in an impressive array of exotic percussion and Croatian bells. Drummer Smith sat behind an oversized kit, and his crash cymbal had the hulking circumference of a flying saucer -- though he looked diminutive in comparison to the set, Smith would nonetheless bang the shit out of it during the group’s more aggressive moments. Multi-instrumentalist and Stewart cousin Caralee McElroy played an array of different toys, from percussion to melodica to synth to harmonium to autoharp. Though the stage was almost completely covered in strange instruments, the strangest had to be Stewart’s voice itself. Shifting seamlessly from the little-boy-needing-his-mommy falsetto weirdness to Ian Curtis bravado on a dime, Stewart led the group through a set of songs culled primarily from their new album, Women as Lovers, alongside some old favorites (“Hello from Eau Claire,” “Fabulous Muscles,” “Boy Soprano”). They closed the night out with live standard “Bog People,” which featured Stewart on zither, a thankfully upbeat and buoyant way to end what wound up being one otherwise movingly disturbing night.
