xiu xiu for you

Jamie Stewart has been both the source of the creative energy and the deep-seeded angst of goth-pop band Xiu Xiu for nearly a decade.  With the release of a new album, Dear God, I Hate Myself, which drops on Kill Rock Stars on Feb 23rd, FMLY got the chance to speak with him about the creative process, his Nintendo DS, hog calls, and everything in-between.  Jamie seems both sophisticated and quirky at the same time, but sends out an affable and welcoming vibe even through the telephone; if that alone wouldn’t command your admiration, his music definitely will.

You can listen to the whole album streaming live here.

FMLY: So Xiu Xiu’s been around for almost a decade now.

Jamie: 8 years, yeah.

Xiu Xiu – Gray Death

F: What has that been like?

J: It’s quite literally a dream come true. Since I was a little kid I wanted to be in a band and make records and tour, and I’ve been able to do that for the last 8 years. Despite the fact that sometimes it’s been physically incredibly difficult or totally humiliating or fraught with personal chaos and peril, the bottom line is I feel extraordinarily fortunate and glad to be able to do it.

F: So you’ve had a few rotating members throughout the years. How do you hook up with these people?

J: Everybody has been people who are in bands that we had toured with and I was personal friends with, or people who I was just friends with before. Nobody that I happened to meet by chance.

F: What do you find they bring to the mix? Who have you been working with lately?

J: Chez Smith has been a part of things on and off, he played on the first record and the past few years has become very involved, he’s an extraordinarily great percussionist and an excellent composer, he has a really interesting melodic sense. His taste in music and my taste in music are very different also, which is fortunate since I already have my brain in the band so it’s great to have his. He has a totally different musical background also.
Angela Seo has been working with stuff on and off for the past couple years, but since has become a full member. She worked a lot on the last record and is gonna be doing all the touring for next year. She has a classical background so her technique is pretty monstrously great.

F: What does she play?

J: She plays keyboard type instruments.

F: What’s the instrumentation you guys are using right now for touring?

J: I’m playing guitar, Angela’s playing mostly synth, and we have a bunch of programmed beats and a lot of different really small modular analog synths. One I just had built for me by this synth company called Health Club, its kind of like a mono analog synth, but you control it with a xylophone type controller as opposed to a keyboard. I also have a really huge collection of bells and gongs and symbols and stuff. Those are our main things for this tour. Oh, we’ve also been using a lot of bird calls, and elk and hog calls, which are amazingly referred to as grunt tubes.

F: Are these instruments you blow through that make animal sounds… or what?

J: They’re not instruments, they’re for hunting, I guess? But they make extraordinarily disturbing sounds. Hunters use them to lure animals. So we’ve been using those a lot. They sound really, really horrible (laughs).

F: Did you use them on any songs in particular?

J: We haven’t recorded with them. I’ve got them since we finished the record. I found a whole bunch of them when I was on tour with a friend’s band. I’m sure next year when we start working on a new record they’ll show up on a lot of stuff. Hey, can you hold on for just five seconds?

[At this moment, Jamie sets down the phone and for a minute or two I hear the sounds of tinkering with electronic melodies and banging, occasionally stopping and starting.  As I will find out later, this is Jamie taking a moment to finish up recording a track on his Nintendo DS. Go figure.] 

Xiu Xiu- Dear God, I Hate Myself

J: Hi sorry about that.

F: No prob.  So I also want to talk to you about the creative process that went into your most recent album. What was your mindset at the time, what was influencing the music you were writing?

J: Oh, as is the case with every record, it would be the events of the year in which the record was being made.

F: Like wordly events?

J: Well, political and personal events. Every record is essentially a document of the time in which it was made. All the songs are about things that were going on in the last two years, either personally or around people that I know and am close to, or within politics. So those would be the topical influences, not necessarily the aesthetic influences.

F: Was there something you were trying to achieve with this album, or make it different from the others?

J: It probably just came out, I think the only singular thing we are trying to achieve with any record is to do the best that we can, and put our hearts into it as much as we can. But, I guess that’s the point (laughs).

F: Having completed the album, do you see it as being different in any way than your earlier albums?

J: Well, I’m absolutely the worst person on earth to ask that. I just see the songs as a continuum. I mean, they’re bookended by records because that’s just how people listen to records, but I’m sure that it’s different. It was made at a different time, different people worked on it, different sets of instruments were used. But I don’t have any perspective on it whatsoever. I will leave that question to a journalist like yourself to answer.

F: Well, I’ve kind of noticed that you seem to have more chaos in this one. There just seems to be more complexity to the noise breakdowns and instruments used. I’m interested to know, was it precisely defined? Like, did you decide, I want this crash symbol here, and this piano gliss here, or did it all just come together naturally?

J: It would really depend on the passage. Some things are totally spontaneous and completely improvised, and some of it you would be disgusted with how much editing goes into it (laughs.)

F: What was the worst editing horror story you’ve had?

J: It’s not that it’s horrible, it’s just really time consuming, and mentally consuming. There’s two electronic breakdowns in the song “Dear God I Hate Myself” that required hands down the most amount of editing I’ve ever done in my entire life. Also the song “Secret Motel” has an insane amount of edits as well.
I use three main things to do electronic sorts of things, one is an older, but at the time sort of sophisticated, hardware sequencer; one is a Gameboy; and one is a computer program called ProTools.

F: How does the Gameboy play in? I’m very curious to know (laughs).

J: There’s this program made by Korg that teamed up with Nintendo to make this analog modeling and drum machine program. Which, at this very moment, is why I had to stop because I had to record something just now. I’m actually using it at this exact moment. (laughs) But it’s very wonderful. It’s very easy to use, you can get really good sounds. There’s almost an infinite number of sonic possibilities within it, and the programming engine is really rudimentary, but it forces you to focus on the song, and not the nuances of what the song might be. You can only write songs with it, because it can’t do anything else. But the upside is that you can wear headphones when you’re in the back of a car, on tour, in the back of the plane, or whatever.

F: Is that why you chose it?

J: I think I chose is because it cost 30 dollars (laughs). It’s great! But that’s not the only reason I chose it. I chose it because it’s totally functional, it’s a fantastic instrument.

F: I mean, there’s something to be said, too, for saying, “I write songs on my Nintendo DS.”

J: (laughs) I’m not alone. It’s a very popular program.

F: I’ve noticed on a few songs that they have kind of a… kitcheny sound. They sound like pots and pans or utensils clanging. Are you actually using things from your kitchen or different kinds of cymbals?

J: Just mostly different kinds of cymbals. I have close to 80 or 90 different gongs or cymbals. They just accumulated over time. When Cory and I started Xiu Xiu we were interested, and continue to be interested, in Asian percussion music. We somehow found this one gong, this very tiny gong, and we were like, “ok, we gotta figure out a way to use this.” So just from travelling alot, and finding ways to procure different instruments I’ve gotten a lot of them.

F: Did you start really inclined towards this more harsh industrial sound, or did it just kind of happen as you started writing?

J: Oh, I’ve always been really interested in the most horrible sounds that you can think of. Musique concrète is almost 80 years old at this point, and industrial music. That’s music I’ve been interested in since I was a teenager. So listening to anybody who would have invented that kind of music would have been the impetus for that.

F: Anyone in particular?

J: Oh you know, Einsturzende Neubauten, Stockhausen, and all those kind of people. One of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life was Einsturzende Neubauten, when I was about 18 or so.

F: What were a few of your favorite songs to record on this album?

J: It would be hard for me to answer. I would feel as if I were being unfaithful to the other songs (laughs.)

F: Yeah, like choosing between your children. Is this album particularly meaningful to you in any way?

J: Oh of course, its about my most recent personal history and the most recent history of the people I care about, so for that reason its probably more meaningful to me than any of the other records because the topics of the songs are the most immediate and the most raw.

F: Is there any particular reason you chose “Dear God I Hate Myself” for the title track?

J: Yeah, it’s been something that’s been horrifyingly present as of late. Kind of struggling with deep seeded feelings of self hate and self loathing, and basically feeling like a huge loser and an asshole lately. Feeling like that is something that is more or less expected of you to maintain as private, and its bad enough to be feeling that way in addition to feeling ashamed to be feeling that way. I debated for a long time as to whether or not you could actually call a record that title, but considering that I had thought about it so much and that it was such a present struggle for me this year, it would have seemed extraordinarily dishonest not to call the record that. Even though it’s ridiculous and heavy-handed, it’s also unfortunately, as of late, true.

F: Has going public with it in this more creative way helped at all?

J: Um, not really. I mean, the point of doing wasn’t to help myself, the point of doing it was to… well, the point of the band has always been to be as honest as possible because bands that have been important to me were bands that were clearly as honest as they could be. It was just another attempt to be a part of that continuum.

F: So where do you see yourself going with this is the future?

J: (laughs sardonically) I don’t have any idea at all! I’ll continue to try to be better every year.

F: A better person or a better musician?

J: (laughs) I gave up on trying to be a better person a long time ago. Try to be a better musician every year. Which is not entirely separate from trying to be a better person I guess, considering it’s what I do with my life. Or try to do with my life.

F: What about being a musician, performing and writing appeals to you the most? Like, what have you found to be most rewarding?

J: Oh… that is a very good question. I don’t think there is any singular thing that is most rewarding. I guess it would be when it becomes apparent that something we have done is meaningful to someone. The point of trying to make music is to give something to somebody else, and if it seems like that is happening based on something that someone has said to someone in the band or to me, then that’s definitely the most rewarding. It makes you feel as if what you’re doing is succeeding, if someone reveals to you that it is meaningful to them.

F: Have you found that comes from fans or people close to you personally?

J: Oh, either one. (laughs) Somebody that I’m close to is not so different to a “fan.” I mean, a fan is a person who might listen to a record that we would do, and a person close to me is someone who might listen to a record that we would do. If anybody gets something out of it, it’s very, very satisfying.

F: So who is Freddy? [off the song “This Too Shall Pass Away (For Freddy)”]

J: Oh, he’s a good friend of mine, Freddy Rupert. I play in his band called Former Ghosts. He used to play in the band “This Song Is A Mess But So Am I” and we toured together a lot. We’ve been friends for years.

F: What have you found the response to your music has been when you’re touring and playing live?

J: Oh, it really depends on where we are. Some nights people seem very excited about it and it seems to be working well; some nights, clearly, people think we suck. You know, it just depends on the night.

F: How do you deal with something like that?

J: Take a sleeping pill and feel like shit (laughs.)

F: Is there anything you’d like to say about this new record in general?

J: Oh, well, I don’t think so. Sounds like you asked a lot of good questions.