Photo: Liz Wendelbo
New York’s avant-garde synth-pop sages Xeno & Oaklander—Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride—return with O Vermillion, a fresh offering from their forthcoming album Via Negativa (in the doorway light). The album’s concept, drawn from the philosophy of negation—“the study of what not to do”—suggests that absence reveals essence. It’s a subtle dance between form and emptiness, between sound and silence, where each note balances upon the edge of nothingness.
In Via Negativa, their trademark analog synthesis unfolds with precision, yet thrums with primal energy, like the rhythm of breathing. Born from late 2023 sessions, it stands as both fragile and fierce—modular synths coursing like electric currents through a still forest.
With O Vermillion, a bilingual hymn in French and English to bloodstones, the duo once again embraces that axis of art and machine, where cables carry the whispers of forgotten myths.
The bloodstone is a symbol steeped in mystery, like life itself. It represents a reminder of the flow of energy; the pulse of the universe moving through all things. Its deep green, speckled with red, whispers of life’s paradox—beauty and brutality, vitality and decay, entwined. Bloodstone invites us to contemplate the dance of life and death, reminding us that one cannot exist without the other. In its ancient patterns, we glimpse the eternal cycle, the quiet rhythm of existence, urging us to embrace both the light and shadow of our being.
Their muse, burnished in shades of red and silver, remains aglow, pointing not to what is known, but to the mysteries—the unspoken, the unseen—that quietly shape our reality. This searing synthpop track in the realm of The Human League – anthemic, eerie, and ethereal, is a meditation; an exploration of the unseen.
Listen to “O Vermillion” below:
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.
Via Negativa (in the doorway light) will be released on November 15th via Dais and is available for pre-order here.
See Xeno & Oaklander on the road in North America this November and December. In February, the band will also be making an appearance at this year’s Grauzone Festival in The Netherlands.
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