Sounds of the underground
Will echo in future days
Feelings of misery
Will fade into the haze
Brooklyn minimal electronic duo Xeno & Oaklander have announced their seventh album, Vi/deo, slated for release on the 22nd of October via Dais Records.
Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride (aka Martial Canterel) took the introspective opportunity the isolation of Covid provided to gaze in the rearview mirror of their time together as Xeno and Oaklander, examining their growth and experiences artistically and personally. The concept of this album fundamentally revolves around isolation and social distancing.
Vi/deo distills their noir synth-pop into a streamlined suite of gleaming, graceful retro-futurism. Inspired by synesthesia, scent, star worship, and obsolescent technologies, the blueprint of Vi/deo was drawn up while sequestered at their Southern Connecticut home studio during the pandemic. The context of isolation, streaming, and remote dreaming seeped into their chemistry, manifesting as both homage to and meditation on Technicolor fantasy: the screen as stage, distance disguised as intimacy, where tragedy and glamour crossfade into one.
This retrospective is presented with a nostalgic collage of photos that accompany the single Infinite Sadness, as the band explores the minimalist terrain of synth-pop via the magic of analogue synthesizers and poetic melody. The result is refined yet oblique; classic but contemporary.
Wendelbo modeled her singing on “a young boy in a choir,” alternately holding notes and whispering them. McBride’s tiered and polished synthesizers serve as the perfect counterpart, threading fluorescent architectures of a lost audio-visual age. Theirs is a dark wave of reverie and romance for concrete bohemia, cigarette smoke in rainy gardens, and sound as colour. The video for the track is a slideshow of a paused life, sunk deep in the inner world of inspiration and creation.
Watch the video for ‘Infinite Sadness” below:
As artists, Xeno and Oaklander have been deeply involved in the analogue synth community since their 2004 debut, Vigils, (Xanten), and have helped inspire synth wave and dark wave throughout the world through their extensive touring and prolific output.
Listen to Infinite Sadness below and pre-order the album here.
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