Vi/Deo

Description

With their seventh album, East Coast minimal wave institution Xeno & Oaklander distill their iconic dark synth-pop into a suite of luminous, graceful retro-futuristic tracks. Inspired by ideas of synesthesia, scents, star worship, and obsolete technologies, the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride began conceptualizing the outlines of Vi/deo while holed up in their home studio in Southern Connecticut during the pandemic. The context of isolation and dreams of escape seeped into their musical chemistry, manifesting as both a tribute to and a meditation on a certain cinematic current filled with Technicolor fantasy: the screen as a stage, distance disguised as intimacy, tragedy and glamour blending into one another. Opening with the synthetic melancholy of "Infinite Sadness," the album marks a peak of fluidity between the fusion of analog electro and poetic melodies, at once refined, indirect, and classic yet contemporary. Liz Wendelbo modeled her vocals on those of a young boy in a choir, alternating sustained notes and whispers. Sean McBride's synthesizers are the perfect counterpart, sleek and multi-layered, weaving fluorescent architectures of a lost audiovisual era. This is a dark wave made of reveries and the flickering lights of the city, elegant and ethereal romantic anthems for urban bohemia, cigarette smoke in a rainy garden, and colors as sound. Vi/deo captures the bittersweet beauty of youth and its utopias, the nostalgic transformation of miracle into memory, where love becomes unreal and music a myth.