Cafe Oto, London, 20/12/23
You know there are going to be earthquakes at a Xylouris White gig, that their mystically hypnotic power might open up fissures in the floor. Jim White can boom the bass drum with the earth flattening intensity of John Bonham. It inches it’s way towards the seated section of audience at Cafe Oto, as if stealthily fleeing the battering it’s receiving from White; like the technique in horror movies where the spectre appears much closer than is humanly possible with each frame.
In the intimate salon that is Oto you sometimes wince and start, as if at a public flogging. However White is a vaudeville flogger, a unique and compelling percussionist. His left arm ascends and curls like a magical CGI creature materialising into the air and comes flying down at the snare. His right drumstick sluices across the cymbals, another tick in his wizardry. He stares out at the audience, not with haughteur, contempt or a craving for appreciation, but serene single-mindedness, his features reminiscent of Donald Sutherland.
He would be able to maintain gravitas even if he was dressed as a wrestler. It’s easy to fixate on White’s flamboyant presence, but his partner, Giorgos Xylouris, sometimes becoming red in the face, as if struggling to keep pace with the Australian drummer, is a highly skilled vocalist and laouto player in his own right: the laouto being a Cretan lute. It’s usually an accompanying instrument, but deployed by Xylouris in a solo capacity. His lyrics are rooted in nature and the traditional rhythms of Mediterranean life.
This is rock mingled with folk in beguiling, thrilling combinations. It bears the imprint of White’s work in The Dirty Three with Mick Turner and Warren Ellis of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. He has also collaborated with PJ Harvey, Cat Power, Marianne Faithful, Bill Callahan and Beth Orton amongst others.
The pair first met in Melbourne in 1990 when Xylouris was touring with his father and have since produced five studio albums. They have a recognisable groove, but are constantly re-inventing and adding adornments to their music.
The first of two sets opens with Second Sister, an instrumental from April’s Drag City release The Forest In Me. It has a flamenco flavour. Telephone Song from 2019’s album The Sisypheans, also has the raw intensity of flamenco’s cante jondo. ‘Soar on a single wing and should you conquer time…’ Giorgos sings.
Black Peak from the 2016 Bella Union album of the same name has a breakbeat reminiscent of electronica, similar to that deployed by Manchester jazz trio Go Go Penguin, and a delirious riddle of a laouto line. Hey Musicians! is a foreboding, hymnal call to arms. Xylouris whistles through its latter bars. The Feast is a composition about killing a hundred animals. “Everyone’s probably vegan in here!” quips White. It starts slowly before the pounding hooves of White’s drums are on the stampede again.
The Forest in Me is largely a set of minatures coming in at two minutes or less. Night Club has delicate, haunting rhythms and Xylouris on a single stringed instrument. It’s accompanied by a humorous ancedote from White about his brother leaving a scarf at Taylor Swift’s house, which she didn’t return. Latin White is dedicated to film maker Rebecca Marshall, a recent collaborator on videos with the duo. It’s reminiscent of a folk dance and White takes up guitar for it. “Not that hard after all,’ he says wryly. Red Wine, another instrumental from The Forest In Me, flows like the fly past of a flock of geese.
On The Sisypheans’ Forging Xylouris sings of the earth trembling underfoot and ‘the wrath of the world forever increasing’. Though not in this evening’s sets it’s a neat summation of the extraordinary timbre and transcendance in the duo’s music, leaving the Oto crowd appreciatively buzzing to its core.
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Words: Adrian Cross; Photos: Richard Gray
