Xylouris White

WIN: Xylouris White, Rue – The Workman’s Club, 30th August

Win a pair of tickets to see Xylouris White & Rue in The Workman’s Club

Xylouris White return to Dublin after their extraordinary performance in Bello Bar last year that felt as much like a local homecoming show for George Xylouris as a touring band in a foreign city. The above clip is a session recorded in Guerilla Studios in Dublin last October.

‘Black Peak’ produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto and featuring backing vocals by Bonnie Prince Billy is out now.

Tickets for their gig with Rue in The Workman’s Club on August 30th are €16 and are available from https://billetto.ie/e/xylouris-white-rue-tickets-204647, but you can also head over to https://thumped.com/bbs/competitions/xylouris-white-the-workmans-club-30th-august.20/ and enter our competition, with thanks to our pal the Enthusiastic Eunuch.

Xylouris White
When Xylouris White recorded their second album, this most intuitive and inquisitive of duos did what comes naturally to them: expanded their horizons. For George Xylouris, the Cretan lute player who partners here with the Dirty Three’s preternaturally fluent Australian drummer Jim White, one aim was to extend a core metaphor of their ruggedly visionary debut album, 2014’s Goats. “Like goats walking in the mountain” is Xylouris’s poetic analogy for their approach: “They may not know the place, but they can walk easily and take risks and feel comfortable. Really, the goats inspired us.”

That exploratory pitch is matched by the majestic Black Peak, named after a mountain top in Crete and, says Xylouris, “recorded everywhere”. A peak in both artists’ careers, the album testifies to their determination to stretch the scope of their instruments and forge something vigorously questing from more traditional roots. Where Goats was mostly instrumental, Black Peak gives Xylouris’s full-force baritone a lead role. And where Goats was often frisky, its tumultuous, tender and terrifically expressive follow-up drives harder and dives deeper.

Xylouris WhitePartly, Black Peak pays testimony to both men’s remarkable histories. One of Crete’s best-loved artists, Xylouris is a scion of Greek musical royalty, a family from a mountain village near the Cave of Zeus. His father is revered singer / lyra player Psarandonis. A child when he began playing the lute, Xylouris would accompany his father in a backing role. Yet just as Psarandonis stretched the lyra’s range (“If music is measured in meter,” Psarandonis said, “I play in kilometre!”), so Xylouris elevated his eight-string laouto to the lead role in his Xylouris Ensemble.

Jim White has commanded international attention for more than two decades as part of Australia’s Dirty Three, storm’s-eye instrumental diviners whose emotionally choppy soundscapes brim with elemental force. Now New York-based, White is often found collaborating with alt-A-listers (including: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, PJ Harvey, Nina Nastasia, Cat Power and Smog,) where his playing redeploys the rolling momentum of free-jazz to supple ends, from sensitive to seismic. PJ Harvey has likened White’s playing to dancing..

It took until 2013 for Xylouris and White to form as a duo, a process accelerated when White played with Xylouris and Psarantonis at a Nick Cave-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Australia. Just as other parties helped unite them, so the path to Black Peak was trod with support. The producer is Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, as on Goats (Xylouris: “His enthusiasm and aesthetic bring richness to the proceedings.”); the ghostly harmonies on “Erotokritos” come from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.

Xylouris White“All these things together, Jim from Australia, me from Crete, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy from Kentucky, Psarantonis from Crete, Guy Picciotto from Washington give us the inspiration of the horizon,” says Xylouris. “Jim and I travel a great deal and we like to do so. We have been doing that together the past three years, which is what inspired us to think of the horizon.

“We’re still goats,” he adds, “now on the horizon.” On the spectacular Black Peak, Xylouris White show just how far their horizons can stretch.

Rue
Rue are Cormac MacDiarmada (fiddle), Brian Flanagan (five-string banjo), and Radie Peat (concertina and harmonium). Rue play traditional songs and tunes from both sides of the Atlantic with an emphasis on the dronier, murderier side of life. Their live performances are a rare thing and infused with understated, goosebumping and often terrible beauty.

Enthusiastic Eunuch proudly presents
Xylouris White (Jim White from Dirty 3 & George Xylouris)
with specials guests Rue
The Workman’s Club
Wednesday 30th August

Xylouris White

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