Today Xeno & Oaklander release their new album ‘Via Negativa (in the doorway light)’ via Dais Records and will kick off their North American tour in support of the LP this Sunday [dates below].
The eighth and latest slate of refined retro-futuristic synth-pop by Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride (aka Xeno & Oaklander) is named after and inspired by “the study of what not to do, a negative image of a positive, the other side, the other: ‘Via Negativa (in the doorway light)’. Recorded in the Autumn of 2023 at their modernist Connecticut home fashioned into a two-story synthesizer laboratory and mixing studio, the album is uniquely visionary in spirit yet precision in execution, a contrast central to the duo’s enduring chemistry. Embryonic piano sketches were translated to nuanced modular systems, which McBride weighted with “harmonic padding,” tuned percussion, and a spectral transfer device capable of “rendering spasms of rhythmic overtonal filigree.” Despite the technological complexity of their craft, emotively the songs require no deciphering – these are technicolor widescreen anthems of the cybernetic age.
From the opening track, the record expands and contracts, cycling through a gallery of moods and masks, animated by the band’s fascination with drama, “the idea of personae,” and theatrical characters. Track by track, a murky, tragic backstory reveals itself: forlorn figures navigating a treacherous mercury mine, alternately poisoned by fumes or buried in collapsing caverns. The tension between Teutonic, utopian synthetic pop and lyrical narratives of ghosts in silos, ruined mills, and the traumas of mineral excavation creates a compelling friction, alternately futurist and obsolete, elevated and subterranean. Wendelbo describes the music’s polarities perfectly: “The heavy machinic din of extraction in contrast with the enchantment of the mined precious gems and metals.”
From bilingual odes to bloodstones (“O Vermillion”) to cosmic chrome dance floor classics (“Lost & There”: “The present tense can never feel real / So many pasts conspire in the burning sun“) to strutting EBM sensualities (“Actor’s Foil”), Xeno & Oaklander re-prove themselves masters of the axis of technology and poetry, snaking cables and synesthesia, mining melodies and myths across 15 years of focused artistry. Theirs is a muse still gilded and gleaming, burnished red and silver, attuned to “the unobservable, the unfamiliar, that which you don’t see directly.”
Xeno & Oaklander, on tour:
Nov 17 Pawtucket, RI – Machines with Magnets
Nov 18 Montreal, QC – Bar Le Ritz PDB
Nov 19 Ottawa, ON – House of Targ
Nov 20 Toronto, ON – Ground Control
Nov 22 Cleveland, OH – No Class
Nov 23 Indianapolis, IN – Black Circle
Nov 24 St Louis, MO – The Sinkhole
Nov 26 Chicago, IL – Beat Kitchen
Nov 27 Milwaukee, WI – X-Ray Arcade
Nov 29 St. Paul, MN – Turf Club
Dec 01 Salt Lake City, UT – The International
Dec 03 Portland, OR – Dante’s
Dec 04 Seattle, WA – Substation
Dec 05 Vancouver, BC – The Cobalt
Dec 08 Los Angeles, CA – The Paramount
Dec 09 San Diego, CA – Soda Bar
Dec 10 Landers, CA – Retreat Center
Dec 12 Denver, CO – Hi-Dive
Dec 14 Kansas City, MO – MiniBar
Dec 16 Louisville, KY – Whirling Tiger
Dec 17 Chapel Hill, NC – Local 506
Dec 19 Baltimore, MD – Metro Gallery
Dec 20 Brooklyn, NY – TV Eye [Record Release Party]
Dec 21 Philadelphia, PA – Milk Boy
04 Feb UK Newcastle – Xerox
05 Feb UK Glasgow – Audio
07 Feb UK London – Lexington
08 Feb NL Den Haag – Grauzone Festival
11 Feb FR Toulouse – Dernière Neige
12 Feb FR Bordeaux – IBoat
13 Feb ES Vigo – La Fábrica
14 Feb ES Madrid – Maravillas Club
15 Feb ES Barcelona – Sala Vol
16 Feb FR Marseille – Molotov
18 Feb DE Munich – Blitz
20 Feb DE Esslingen – Komma
21 Feb DE Leipzig Moritz – Bastei
22 Feb DE Berlin – Lark
