“Maybe it seems a bit disparate or something, but it actually flows pretty naturally,” White says. “It’s weird where you end up. I guess really the bands I’ve been most involved with is Venom P Stinger and Dirty Three and now Xylouris White, and obviously other things along the way. You have to think about [all of the projects] separately, but there’s always a thread.”
Xylouris came to prominence playing alongside his father Antonis Xylouris (Psarantonis) and uncle Nikos Xylouris (Psaronikos), two famous composers of Cretan folk music. While their musical bloodline is worlds apart, the union between White and Xylouris didn’t happen completely out of the blue.
“George and my relationship goes back to 25 years ago in Melbourne and me hearing George play and his father play,” White says. “I was listening to that music for many years and never really playing it. We talked about it for a number of years and then finally we just started doing it. To me it’s a very natural way of playing and a way that you find out about yourself and about your playing. You develop as you go along and sometimes you don’t realise it. It just feels very true and natural to me.”
A further example of White’s ongoing artistic curiosity is his recent foray into performance art, More Up A Tree. Premiering late last year, More Up A Tree saw him collaborate with dancer Claudia de Serpa Soares and visual artist Eve Sussman on a piece that merges dance, music and interactive performance art.
“We started that a couple of years ago just out of interest,” White says. “Many years ago Dirty Three and Cat Power played three nights at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and the lighting lady said, ‘Come down and see what I do.’ I went down to the San Francisco Ballet and saw a dress rehearsal, and I had this amazing reaction to seeing that abstract dance piece. I’ve lived in New York for a long time and sometime later I was telling my friend about how I’d like to do something with a dancer and it sort of just happened. This dancer was part of our social circle and we just started working together. Around the same time someone invited me to be an artist in residence at a place in California and me and some friends went down there and starting working on it.
“I find music very mysterious, but you sort of forget that because you listen to it all the time and you’re involved in it,” he adds. “With dance I was like, ‘Why on earth does dance feel like something?’ So we just started. Everyone had their own reasons why they wanted to do it. It was just the three of us – the visual artist, the dancer and myself. It came to fruition last year. We did a premiere in Luxembourg and then we did three nights at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York].”
White’s open to the idea of bringing More Up A Tree down to Australia (if approached with the right offer), but he’s putting most of energy towards Xylouris White for the time being. The duo’s first LP, Goats, came out in 2014, and the second one isn’t too far off. “For me it’s so joyful and so natural and different and it feels like there’s lots of places for it to go as well,” White says. “We’re mixing the album soon actually. That’ll come out later in the year.”
We’ll get a taste of the new material when Xylouris White perform a duo of Melbourne shows this weekend. Given the constituents’ disparate backgrounds, they’re a difficult band to categorise. Their music is rooted in traditional Cretan music, but it’s ambitiously experimental and apparently formless. This stylistic aberrance gives them tremendous malleability when it comes to the artists they can go on tour with.
“We’ve done a lot of shows with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, done shows with Swans, we’ve done some folk festivals and even rock festivals and also world music festivals. Kurt Vile’s a different one again. We did a tour with Bonnie Prince Billy. I like the fact that we can move around like that.”
Moving around is precisely what’ll experience during a Xylouris White live show. Their setlists are founded around the compositions captured on record, but they’re liable to go off script.
“Our music is traditional Cretan music, which I play all my life really,” says Xylouris. “But we’ve got our own material, and it’s really open every time to do stuff into that and they come to be different every time we play the same stuff. There’s a lot of improvising; they’re always different. We listen to old and new stuff and into that we put our flavours and our intensity.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
