Xiu Xiu

Xiu Xiu is an American avant-garde group originally from San Jose, California. The band is the brainchild of singer-songwriter Jamie Stewart, who has been its only constant member since its inception in 2002. His current bandmate is multi-instrumentalist Angela Seo. The band's name is taken from the 1998 Chinese film Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl.

Read almost any piece about Xiu Xiu and you’ll see words like ‘harsh’ or ‘brutal’ – the same words that appear before ‘truth’ when an unwavering eye is turned on any intimate detail of our lives. For almost a decade now, Jamie Stewart and a rotating cast of musicians have released some of the least comforting music around, stocked with personal trauma and sexual crises, heavy on anguish and light on restraint. Although Stewart’s songs are rock songs, basically, they’re deconstructed and fragmented beyond recognition. Electronic bass hiss, cheap keyboards, a beautiful, vulnerable voice: Imagine throwing pop songs out of a fifth-floor window and watching the shatter. Xiu Xiu songs are what you’d sweep off the sidewalk afterward.

‘For some people, sex and sexuality are really intense driving forces, or really intense aspects of personal torture, or a really deep part of personal identity and personal politics and social politics. I think because the band is all about those things, it’s not as if we’re a band that’s just about dirty, weird, fucked-up sex. Dirty, weird, fucked-up sex and sexual politics are part of life’ is what Jamie Stewart has told in one of the interviews.

This will be the first and so far only Xiu Xiu show in the Baltic states.