Xeno & Oaklander Announce New Album ‘Via Negativa’

Xeno & Oaklander have announced details of their forthcoming new album Via Negativa (in the doorway light), set for release on November 15^th via Dais, and have shared the album’s opening title track and accompanying music video.

The eighth and latest slate of refined retro-futuristic synth-pop by Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride aka Xeno & Oaklander is named after and inspired by “the study of what not to do, a negative image of a positive, the other side, the other: ‘Via Negativa (in the doorway light).'”

Recorded in the Autumn of 2023 at their modernist Connecticut home fashioned into a two-story synthesizer laboratory and mixing studio, the album is uniquely visionary in spirit yet precision in execution, a contrast central to the duo’s enduring chemistry. Embryonic piano sketches were translated to nuanced modular systems, which McBride weighted with “harmonic padding,” tuned percussion, and a spectral transfer device capable of “rendering spasms of rhythmic overtonal filigree.” Despite the technological complexity of their craft, emotively the songs require no deciphering– these are technicolor widescreen anthems of the cybernetic age.  

The eponymous opening track sets the pace, soaring sleekly over glittering synths and call-and-response vocals about arias, shattered light, and faces in stereo.

Taking cues from Carmello Bene’s 1974 Television film “Amleto” and Raúl Ruiz‘ 1978 film,“The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting”, the video for “Via Negativa (in the doorway light)” captures the duo in various static poses and disembodied gestures whilst videographer, Scott Kiernan’s mixed use of 1970s analog, tube and broadcast cameras impart a kaleidoscopic frenzy of eroding outlines, subtracted colours, film set restrictions, and fourth wall dissolution. 

From the opening track, the record expands and contracts, cycling through a gallery of moods and masks, animated by the band’s fascination with drama, “the idea of personae,” and theatrical characters. Track by track, a murky, tragic backstory reveals itself: forlorn figures navigating a treacherous mercury mine, alternately poisoned by fumes or buried in collapsing caverns. The tension between Teutonic, utopian synthetic pop and lyrical narratives of ghosts in silos, ruined mills, and the traumas of mineral excavation creates a compelling friction, alternately futurist and obsolete, elevated and subterranean. Wendelbo describes the music’s polarities perfectly: “The heavy machinic din of extraction in contrast with the enchantment of the mined precious gems and metals.”
 
From bilingual odes to bloodstones (“O Vermillion”) to cosmic chrome dance floor classics (“Lost & There”: “The present tense can never feel real / So many pasts conspire in the burning sun“) to strutting EBM sensualities (“Actor’s Foil”), Xeno & Oaklander re-prove themselves masters of the axis of technology and poetry, snaking cables and synesthesia, mining melodies and myths across 15 years of focused artistry. Theirs is a muse still gilded and gleaming, burnished red and silver, attuned to “the unobservable, the unfamiliar, that which you don’t see directly.” 
 
Via Negativa (in the doorway light) will be released on November 15^th via Dais. Pre-order here.

Xeno & Oaklander, live:

Dec 20  New York, NY – TV Eye [Record Launch Party]
Feb 7, 8, 9  Den Haag, NL – Grauzone Festival