Xeno & Oaklander Share New Single & Video for 'Poison'

East Coast minimal wave duo Xeno & Oaklander have shared a new single from their seventh full-length album, Vi/deo, which is set for release on October 22nd release on Dais Records. Watch (+ share) the music video for "Poison" on YouTube.

Vi/deo further distills their iconic noir synth pop into a streamlined suite of gleaming, graceful retrofuturism. Inspired by ideas of synaesthesia, scent, star worship, and obsolescent technologies, the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride began conceiving the blueprint of Vi/deo while sequestered at their Southern Connecticut home studio during the pandemic.

The context of isolation, streaming, and remote dreaming seeped into their chemistry, manifesting as both homage to and meditation on a certain cinematic strain of technicolor fantasy: the screen as stage, distance disguised as intimacy, where tragedy and glamor crossfade into one.

Following the melancholic pop gem "Infinite Sadness," new single "Poison" shudders and echoes with dramatic 80's syncopated disco glam. "We were dying to make a horror film in the style of Suspiria, and we wanted it to look like a VHS tape from the video store" Wendelbo comments on the accompanying video. "Poison has an Italo Disco feel to it and co-directing with Scott Kiernan felt like the perfect match"

Set for release on October 22nd via Dais Records (pre-order here), Vi/deo'captures the bittersweet beauty of youth and utopias, the wistful transformation from miracle to memory, where love turns unreal and music becomes myth: "Sounds of the underground / Will echo in future days / Feelings of misery / Will fade into the haze."

The album marks a peak fluidity between the pair's fusion of analogue electronics and poetic melody, both refined and oblique, classic but contemporary. Wendelbo modelled her singing on "a young boy in a choir," alternately holding notes and whispering them, with the lyrics clear, the voice elevated. McBride's synthesizers serve as the perfect counterpart, tiered and polished, threading fluorescent architectures of a lost audio-visual age. Theirs is a darkwave of reverie and flickering city lights, swooning and sleek, romantic anthems for concrete bohemia, cigarette smoke in rainy gardens, and sound as color ("blue is fast and red is slow").

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