New York’s synth-pop savants Xeno & Oaklander are back with their eighth full-length effort, Via Negativa (in the doorway light), slated for a fall release via Dais Records. The avant-garde duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride—long known for their meticulous blend of retro and futurist aesthetics—have today revealed the album’s title track alongside a new music video that plunges headfirst into an unsettling realm of analog surrealism.
The concept behind Via Negativa borrows from the philosophical— “the study of what not to do,” as they describe it, “a negative image of a positive, the other side, the other.” It’s an approach that speaks to their entire oeuvre, a balancing act between structure and void, signal and noise. The new record, born from their late 2023 sessions, crystallizes this duality: a collection of modular synth symphonies that pulse with both precision and visceral intensity.
Crafted in the pair’s shadowy studio sanctum, these compositions started as embryonic piano lines and grew into elaborate, interconnected modular synth systems. McBride, ever the architect, adds what he calls “harmonic padding,” weaving together tuned percussion and a “spectral transfer device” to shape the album’s rhythmic architecture. The outcome is a deeply textured sonic landscape that captures Xeno & Oaklander’s fascination with the tension between raw spontaneity and measured exactitude.
While there’s a deliberate intricacy to the production, the emotional core remains sharp and vibrant. Via Negativa (in the doorway light) doesn’t just float on shimmering synths—it throbs with life, darting between frenetic choruses that evoke images of broken mirrors, fractured light, and ghostly visages suspended in static. These are no mere exercises in style; they are anthems for a cybernetic dawn.
The visual companion to the title track, directed by Scott Kiernan, draws heavily from Carmelo Bene’s Amleto and Raúl Ruiz’s The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting. The video is a delirious mash of 1970s analog techniques, a chaotic collage of fading images, disembodied gestures, and jarring colors that disintegrate within the frame. Kiernan uses vintage broadcast cameras to craft a space where filmic constraints turn to poetic disarray, where each frame is a fragile echo of a bygone era.
Watch the video for “Via Negativa (in the doorway light)” below:
From its opening moments, Via Negativa (in the doorway light) sweeps across a spectrum of tones and textures, an exploration of the interplay between sound and space, light and shadow. The album leans into theatrical drama, with each track unspooling a narrative that shifts between abstract and visceral. Whether it’s tragic figures suffocating in mercury mines or spectral synths echoing across desolate industrial sites, Xeno & Oaklander have created a work that feels both timeless and tethered to the now—haunted yet hopeful, methodical yet maddening.
Throughout the album, Wendelbo’s vocals hover in a state of otherworldly calm, drawing you deeper into the cryptic landscape they’ve constructed. Her lyrics—alternating between English and French—explore existential themes with a painterly touch, marrying technological rigor to poetic sensibility. Tracks move from bloodstone ballads to pulsing EBM rhythms, reaffirming the duo’s ability to fuse the mechanical with the mystical, the corporeal with the celestial.
Via Negativa (in the doorway light) is out on November 15, 2024.
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