Jamie Stewart is a Berlin-based musician, best known for forming the singular and prolific experimental group Xiu Xiu. The band’s discography is incredibly dynamic, encompassing countless genres— early albums like Fabulous Muscles (which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year) are still incredible with each revisit, and I find their more recent releases, such as the album Ignore Grief, to be just as idiosyncratic and great. Aside from their incredible albums, they’ve also put out some neat projects like this Twin Peaks soundtrack cover album or this insane cover of Rihanna’s Only Girl In the World (that I cherish deeply). Stewart’s memoir Anything That Moves came out last year, receiving praise from other creative icons like Lydia Lunch and Vaginal Davis, and you can check it out here. Our Berlin readers can catch a Xiu Xiu DJ set at Benefit Gig for Gaza on June 30th. Today, Xiu Xiu announces their upcoming record 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips, set to release in September on Polyvinyl records. We cannot wait, and lucky for us, Jamie is here to tell us what they are into.
for california level banh mi DO IT! dont be a slob be a snob!
Animalia is novel by French author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo and it may be the best book i have ever read. It is set on a family pig farm around WWI and in the 1980s and is RIFE with disgusting beauty, shocking physicality, unusual astoundingly imaginative turns of events and both wonderful humanity and wonderful inhumanity. the writing is dense but never tedious as are the emotions and feral motivations it explores. i found myself laughing out loud not at how funny it is but at how incredible it is. i wish it were 3,000,000,000 pages long. it is his first work translated into english and my bandmate, who introduced me to it, is learning french just so she can read his other books.
as a band we have a healthy collection of pedals, not as many as some but certainly an interesting selection. one of the most curious new ones we have is the Lossy by Chase Bliss. There are lots of degeneration pedals but this one specifically emulates shitty early digital/mp3/cdr/internet dying types of sounds. though based on past technology, it is an unsettling device as makes the sounds of our current, failing civilization's most recent problems: an over reliance on inherently bad communication methodologies and representations. it makes sounds that are bad for you but in a charming way. it reminds you that the end is high nigh but the pedal is bright pink so it will be a cutie pie, cartoonish kind of smashy smashy ending.
vaginal davis is one of my art heros and a major, lifelong inspiration. she has an art exhibition in stockholm that spans 5!!!!!! museums called magnificent product. it is more than remarkable to see a body of work that spans more than 40 years be more exciting today than ever before. she has the ability to be politically astute, sexual, funny, heart breaking, bizarre, literate, crass, culturally cutting and culturally embracing. her work is magic in the truest and most literal sense of the word in that her work will change you. installations, film, painting, photos, collage and writing that is worth any effort to go but buy the catalog if you (not unreasonably) cannot important sections of the exhibitions are in collaboration with CHEAP and Jonathan Berger.
streaming music is fucking dumb. it sounds like ass, a person who doesn't know anything about music programs a robot to tell what you should like, it makes music extremely disposable and therefore meaningless and it is 99.99% theft from musicians. however things that are fucking dumb and the music business were made for each other-so if that is what it's going to be, you might as well use a GREAT streaming (steaming) platform. Radiooooo is a map of the world and timeline of decades. you pick a country and pick a decade and music from there and from then will play. 1990s Algeria BOOM! 1940s Brazil ZAP! 2010s Czech Republic BLAMO! 1960s South Korea ZORK! it is curated by music fans not an algorithm and you can set it at slow, fast or weird or all three. if you have to drink poison at least drink bitchin' poison.
i moved to berlin about a year and half ago from los angeles, one of the GREAT food cities on earth which having traveled a fair amount i feel i can say with snobbish authority. with equal snobbish authority i feel i can say the food in berlin SUCKS. i have no idea why. it is relatively diverse and cosmopolitan but somehow the idea of great food has evaded this place. a single bright spot is the Lebanese restaurant Qadmous. even a heart wrenchingly deprived and cynical faux gourmand will be delighted by how fresh, careful, classically presented yet surprising the fare is every time. also, they have good service, another berlin rarity. it is not cheap but considering you are better off cooking at home, the one time you do go out, go for it.
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