Xibling Premieres “Sheets Of White Paper” Music Video | Interview With The Band

Portland based electronic duo Xibling are gracing the world with their music video premiere of “Sheets of White Paper” off their Light Pollution EP which just dropped yesterday! Often compared to Diamanda Galas and Nina Hagen by locals, Xibling are a truly crazy, unstoppable force. I was immediately sold the first time I saw them at Black Water Bar back in March. When Dave Cantrell asked what I thought I responded, “I feel like I’m among demigods” and I stand by that statement. There is something otherworldly about Xibling.

The X signifies the eternal variable of life; The yet named new present, and the past perceptions we strike-out as no longer living truth. Crossed by conjoined i’s, signifying the balance of individuals and interconnection. Cultivating reverence and engagement with the ever changing nature of reality, which is absolutely a relational construct. Together, with the vertical line left undefined, it forms the sigil of chaos, evoking All Options but hierarchical providence. Happy interdepenDance life, may we all grow freer and kin’der together.

How did you guys first meet and form the band? Are you both from Portland?

Xibling: Oregon has always been home, give or take. We moved to Portland in 2012. 2013 we released our first single together, under the name Basement City. Xibling is the incarnation that found its way, through much transformation, to the surface world for our first fully formed performance in February 2018. Now that we made it up here, we stand atop so much fertile composted soil of the Basement City years, the growth is bountiful!

What inspires your lyrics? What is your writing process like?

Xibling: We have both been severely creative our whole lives. Constant, compulsively tapped-in, channels, with very little externally enforced structures around process and form requirements. So our writing process/inspiration is pretty much just turning on the faucet and letting it pour out, freely and often! Which, of course is always as richly contextual as anything else in any given moment in time.

Witnessing what creations then survive the byzantine conduit of existing, to sort of “mature” into something that can go into the world and live a life of it’s own amongst the other humans, is way more mysterious.

Your new video for “Sheets Of White Paper” is very unique– what inspired the visuals? What can you tell us about the new music video?

Xibling: Sheets of White Paper is a metaphor for the hyper-conductive struggle/dance of zero and one, nature and nurture, surrender and civilization, wonder and will, the poetic and the literal, etc. etc. etc.

“Do you ever come face to face with a sheet of white paper, and think maybe, just maybe, it’s perfect already, and there is nothing for you to do here?”

Julian has been making films since childhood. Our very first project together was a music video for Mo’s old band. We have made more than a dozen music videos together since then.

For this one, we wanted to visually distill a balance of the cryptic communication of meaning via poetry, with the striking nature of stark blunt directness, to represent not only the concept of the “blankness” but also what it, and we, become when we face it.

Xibling: Playing live is like stepping outside for the first time in days and remembering what it means to be alive; there is so much in the larger shared context of OUTSIDEWORLD. It’s very stimulating. Both pleasurably and terrifyingly, overwhelming. We love conducting and releasing that heightened energy with others in whatever shared space time context!

And Mo has been a painter/visual artist her whole life, she has been designing wearables forever, and sewing since she was 12. She makes all of her stage-wear, and her creative liferaft thru capitalism is her one-woman custom fashion house at MoWestCreations.etsy.com

Xibling: As for non-musical influences; film and the framed, time-based, visual/audio immersion forms are certainly influential. As well as the integration of deep-aestheticism with shadow-work/mirror-work modes; spiritual practices where the negative is granted a stage to be as vile, heartless, helpless, cynical, and ‘bad’ as it wants; let the demons get their ya-yas out, ya know? But they do it in a place where we get to make the container as beautiful, digestible, or stimulating as we need to to be, to be able to be with the dark reflections.

How important are aesthetics to you?

Xibling: That last answer ties into our views of the deeper usefulness of aesthetics; a word that Mo’s brain often associates with anesthetics, ie: something that numbs feeling, something that keeps us on the shallow surface. But as visual artists, we know aesthetics can absolutely be used to go deeper than most ever would if all aesthetic consideration/expression was shunned… it’s sacred alchemical trickster work.

Xibling: We were thrilled to work with Jeremy Wilkins at Underwater Research and Design, who was an angelic electric midwife, helping to bring the Light Pollution EP to a lasting life of it’s own.

If the Ground Zero EP was like a frenetic nuclear detonation of some bunker wall we burrowed up to from our subterranean Basement City. That we needed to blast through, because the world is downright apocalyptic and we have no time to waste with more polite means of emergence.

Then Light Pollution is what we see when we are standing, with no walls in front of us. Only the first sight of the quivering, crumbling, blinding, breakneck shrapnel that this humanized world seems to be teeteringly constructed from. And the grappling recognition that Here We Are: In It.

Xibling: We wanna play lots of exciting live shows. Make lots of inspired music videos. Integrate projections/visuals into our live rig. introduce more robots to our family. See what happens when people remix us. Work towards an LP that would feel like enough content to validate pressing to nonrenewable plastic materials.