The careful, melancholic, and complex songs of Xeno and Oaklander are the product of the brightest duo in the contemporary minimal electronics world. Merging the cold, cinematic aesthetics of artist Liz Wendelbo with the architectural exactitude of Sean McBride (a.k.a. Martial Canterel), Xeno and Oaklander have been the flinty, sharpened spearhead of twenty-first-century electronic pop since their formation in 2004. Using analog synthesizers and instruments exclusively, the duo record all of their songs live in the studio, a defiant challenge to the common practice of artificial, overdubbed, computerized music. Their intensely melodic, mournful, and emotive oeuvre is an invocation of a lost future that was abandoned years ago in favor of something less human. Alongside their performance at the New Museum, Xeno and Oaklander will premiere a new series of films by Liz Wendelbo entitled “Sets and Lights.”
No Fun Acid is the newest strain from Carlos Giffoni, New York noise music mainstay and founder of the annual No Fun Festival. Relegating the antisocial tendencies of his previous projects to the subtext, No Fun Acid demonstrates Giffoni’s fascination with the repetitive, hypnotic, trance-like sounds of acid house music. Compositions stretch into twenty-minute journeys of heavy bass, squelching electronic tones, and wailing tones that shuffle between blissful dance rhythms and unsettling, futuristic noisescapes.