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Xylouris White
https://www.xylouriswhite.com/
Xylouris White announce new album Mother
A passion for exploration comes naturally to Xylouris White, the ruggedly visionary duo formed of Cretan lute player George Xylouris and Australian drummer Jim White. For their debut album, 2014s Goats, Xylouris White compared themselves to the titular animals, wandering fearlessly through rough-hewn terrain. Two years later, they showed how far their horizons could reach on 2016s majestically expansive Black Peak, named after a mountain top in Crete.
Just 15 well-toured months later, the duos exploratory instincts drive them further onwards still on their third album, Mother, released 19th January on Bella Union, and named to denote new life. As Xylouris puts it, Mother is the extension of Goats and Black Peak. Three things, all part of a whole. Goats are mothers, Zeus was raised on Amaltheias milk, Black Peak is Mother Earth Mother Earth is the mother of everything. The duo have shared a first track from the album titled Only Love, which is steaming HERE, while the album is available to preorder here.
Across Mothers nine tracks, Xylouris White nurture fecund growths from the spaces between their instruments. Sometimes the songs drive with an invigorating urgency; sometimes they brood, plead, yearn and lull. The duo seem to discover each other anew at every turn, teasing the songs out from their fluid chemistry with the kind of virtuosity that knows when to listen, accommodate and learn afresh. A theme of the album is the significance of simplicity and a child-like approach, Xylouris explains. So, we connect mother and child and play instruments as toys. Xylouris White is still gestating.
That ongoing gestation is a remarkable extension of already remarkable back-stories. Xylouris is a scion of one of Greeces most revered musical families. His father is legendary singer and lyra player Psarantonis. Jim White, meanwhile, has commanded international attention for more than two decades as part of Australias Dirty Three. Now New York-based, White has often been called on to collaborate with numerous alt-A-listers (including: Bonnie Prince Billy, PJ Harvey, Cat Power and Smog), where he redeploys the rolling momentum of free-jazz to variously supple, sensitive and seismic ends. Most recently he performed with Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett on their acclaimed album Lotta Sea Lice.
Album opener In Medias Res finds the duo already in motion, feeling their way around one another, seeking out ways to bring a song to full bloom. Proving they can also be thrillingly direct when the mood takes them, Only Love follows with a brilliantly barrelling sense of momentum, Whites powerhouse percussion urging Xylouriss liquid-fingered lute-playing and impassioned baritone on to increasing heights of urgency.
From here, Xylouris White proceed as if by intuition, feeling their way around new terrain. Motorcycle Kondilies is muscular and epic, Whites rimshots providing on-alert accompaniment as Xylouriss reaching vocal and dancing lute lines build in intensity. If the marching rhythm and pretty lute melody of Spuds Garden highlights the duos occasional elegant side, Daphne and Achilles Heel showcase Xylouris Whites at their most hypnotic and brooding. Woman from Anogeia hosts a particularly emotive vocal from Xylouris; Call and Response is the duo at their freeform finest, circling each other querulously, again teasing at possibility. Finally, resolution is embraced openly on the tactile and reverberant Lullaby, as lovely a track as any Xylouris White have birthed.
As on Black Peak, Mothers labours benefited from the midwifery of choice collaborators. Fugazis Guy Picciotto produced once again. Also on hand this time was Anna Roberts-Gevalt of old-time folk duo Anna & Elizabeth, whose earthy violin/viola lines and exquisitely sighing vocals can be heard on the track Lullaby.
The result is an album of extraordinary accomplishment from two supremely seasoned players whove kept a close kinship with the richly, rewardingly inquisitive instincts of their youth. In Xylouriss words, Its the natural maturity of fruits as they ripen. As fruit matures by the rhythm of nature, so the music grows at its own pace. So, here are two maturing fruits giving the taste of their present maturity and theyre still children.
http://bellaunion.com/2017/10/xylouris-white-announce-new-album-mother/
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