Interview by Matteo PiniPortrait by Eva Luise Hoppe

Across their two-decade-long career as a band, Xiu Xiu, helmed by musician Jamie Stewart, have become experimental music’s flagbearers of extremity. Plumbing some of the darker topics – child sexual abuse, suicide, lynching, self-harm – across a mutating lineup currently rounded out by Angela Seo and David Kendrick, the band have been defined by Stewart’s trademark whimper-like delivery and an avowedly discordant approach to song structure. But far from mere shock-jock provocation, the proximate details of Xiu Xiu songs consider geopolitics, the body, the nature of spectatorship and Stewart’s personal history. This experience is drawn in vivid detail in their memoir of sexual encounters Anything That Moves, which was published by And Other Stories earlier this year. The band return this year with 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips, their fourteenth album, whose title refers to a pocket knife owned by Stewart.

Matteo Pini  Do you remember your first encounter with evil?

Jamie Stewart  It’s a pretty grim story. I had a neighbour who had two older brothers who took me into the garage and covered my body with hickeys. I didn’t register it as evil because I was young, probably four or five, but as an adult, I realised that probably would qualify as evil in my head. I don’t know if for them it was sexual or about control or if they were just crazy. My reaction at the time was to be completely baffled by what was going on. My mother was quite young, and she didn’t know how to react to such a strange type of violation.

MP When you’re expressing darker subject matter artistically, how does your relationship to the material develop? Is it like an exorcism?

JS It’s certainly not an exorcism. I wish it was! It’s more of a way to organise my thoughts. I’m essentially completely nuts and not in a good way: I have a very difficult time with stress, with negative emotions, with losing my mind or doing very self-destructive things. But writing about feeling hideously overwhelmed by my personal state, or the state of people that I care about, or politics or the environment; writing directly about evil or about people who’ve been affected by evil is a way to compartmentalise that sense of being overwhelmed. The feeling doesn’t go away but it’s an opportunity to transform it from something that would become outwardly destructive or self-destructive. It’s a place to put that energy rather than to act it out physically, one way or another.

MP I was reading some of your old interviews, and there was a sense that people were perceiving Xiu Xiu as a kind of joke, that the intensity of the subject matter bordered on satire or camp. Now that the world is increasingly tragic and ridiculous, do you feel vindicated at all?

JS I think I didn’t care at the time, so I don’t care now. Even though it might have come across as being so over the top that it was ridiculous, I knew we meant it, and that for a small number of people, it made sense. The world is completely fucked up now, but it was completely fucked up then, although the forces of evil certainly seem to be a little more organised and focused than they were 20 years ago.

MP  Historically, evil acts seem to be done with the intention to resolve; it’s a violence that looks to eliminate a people or problem.

JS  I think that’s a fair description of what evil actually is. What is violent revenge if not evil? But that illusion of there being a resolution to violence is absurd. It’s just continuous and unresolved, as is demonstrated by the entire history of humanity.

MP You recently published a book. Was the process of writing it similar to the musical process?

JS It was surprisingly different. I don’t have any great designs to be a writer and I don’t know that I necessarily have another book in me. I appreciated the chance to do this book, mostly because it makes me feel fancy. Unlike with music, I found that writing about these experiences exorcised many of the things that were negatively present in my mind. A lot of the stories in the book were uncomfortable things I thought about pretty regularly. After writing about them in a directly linear, traditionally narrative way, somehow I forgot about them, or they don’t bother me anymore. Which is probably a good lesson to me that linear narrative writing may be a more effective way to get stuff out of my mind than doing music.

MP What is the most evil object that you own?

JS Probably my fucking iPhone. How it is made is evil, the company that makes it is evil, 99% of what it leads to every time I leave the front door is evil. Almost nothing good has come out of the world’s most ubiquitous item. But it’s helping me learn German, so I’d say it’s maybe 95% evil instead of 99% evil.

MP Do you think there’s space in life for redemption?

JS Humanity wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t. The vast majority of people are attempting to redeem themselves every day, it’s just unfortunate that a small number of psychopaths have garnered a massive amount of power, and that they’re uninterested in anything other than themselves. In everyday functioning, if you’re not doing something shitty to somebody, that is inherently redemptive. If you don’t murder somebody today, that’s redemptive. Evil is so much easier and so much more powerful than good, and it doesn’t take much to do the wrong thing. If you have a fish tank of water, and you put one drop of fertiliser in it, it contaminates the entire tank. Unfortunately, the ramifications of doing the wrong thing are so much worse than the ramifications of doing the right thing. If you kiss somebody on the cheek, it feels nice for a second. But if you punch somebody in the face, that hurts for like, five hours. It’s a bad design. Luckily, there’s a lot more kissing than there is face punching.  .