Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Pop fell away from the heart
For Xiu Xiu’s latest, Stewart found deadline “pressure more than anything was the solution” to writing lyrics.
Asked how San Diego treats his now-L.A.–based band Xiu Xiu, singer Jamie Stewart tells the Reader via email: “It has been mixed. There have been shows that were totally sold out and the people were incredibly enthusiastic and there have been shows where there were ten people and I have no idea why they came and they really did not seem to want to be there. It is always a roll of the dice for us. Nothing wrong with that, though.... We have played at Ché Café, Casbah, Soda Bar, house shows...”
Xiu Xiu, playing Soda Bar on March 25, takes oddity and randomness in stride, though. Over 12 years and 12 albums of original material, they’ve pushed discordant noise and provocation as far as any band could and still, just barely, be called pop-rock. They named themselves after a Chinese film and named their current album Angel Guts: Red Classroom after a Japanese skin flick.
Explains Stewart on the new direction for the record: “John Congleton, who mixed our record Always, which was an incredibly dense art-pop record, suggested we go the other direction with Angel Guts — spare, simple, and dark. Pop fell away from heart. It is an homage to Suicide, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nico, and Kraftwerk. In the past, we used every sound we could find and with this new one it is only a drum set, analog synth, and analog drum machine.
“Despite its simplicity,” Stewart continues, “it was quite difficult to write after having been devoted to more complicated arrangements in the past. Reorienting the approach took longer than I thought, despite it feeling so right conceptually. I was writing lyrics and recording vocals until the last week before the deadline. Pressure more than anything was the solution.”
Stewart’s fresh and bushy-tailed from a recent move to L.A. from North Carolina, saying the only thing he misses about the South is “a bar called ‘Whiskey.’” On Los Angeles 2014, he opines: “I grew up here but had not lived here since I was 20. I was surprised by how much it improved in fundamental ways. Less violence, better air quality, better food, less traffic. It is at times confusing in an amusing way to be some place that is at once very familiar but also quite evolved.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Pop fell away from the heart
Pop fell away from the heart
For Xiu Xiu’s latest, Stewart found deadline “pressure more than anything was the solution” to writing lyrics.
Asked how San Diego treats his now-L.A.–based band Xiu Xiu, singer Jamie Stewart tells the Reader via email: “It has been mixed. There have been shows that were totally sold out and the people were incredibly enthusiastic and there have been shows where there were ten people and I have no idea why they came and they really did not seem to want to be there. It is always a roll of the dice for us. Nothing wrong with that, though.... We have played at Ché Café, Casbah, Soda Bar, house shows...”
Xiu Xiu, playing Soda Bar on March 25, takes oddity and randomness in stride, though. Over 12 years and 12 albums of original material, they’ve pushed discordant noise and provocation as far as any band could and still, just barely, be called pop-rock. They named themselves after a Chinese film and named their current album Angel Guts: Red Classroom after a Japanese skin flick.
Explains Stewart on the new direction for the record: “John Congleton, who mixed our record Always, which was an incredibly dense art-pop record, suggested we go the other direction with Angel Guts — spare, simple, and dark. Pop fell away from heart. It is an homage to Suicide, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nico, and Kraftwerk. In the past, we used every sound we could find and with this new one it is only a drum set, analog synth, and analog drum machine.
“Despite its simplicity,” Stewart continues, “it was quite difficult to write after having been devoted to more complicated arrangements in the past. Reorienting the approach took longer than I thought, despite it feeling so right conceptually. I was writing lyrics and recording vocals until the last week before the deadline. Pressure more than anything was the solution.”
Stewart’s fresh and bushy-tailed from a recent move to L.A. from North Carolina, saying the only thing he misses about the South is “a bar called ‘Whiskey.’” On Los Angeles 2014, he opines: “I grew up here but had not lived here since I was 20. I was surprised by how much it improved in fundamental ways. Less violence, better air quality, better food, less traffic. It is at times confusing in an amusing way to be some place that is at once very familiar but also quite evolved.”
Comments