Xenia Xamanek – making reality reverberate with potential
Xenia Xamanek – “Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay]” (Scorpio Red Records, 2025) – review by Macon Holt
Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay] is the latest album from multidisciplinary, Honduran-Danish artist Xenia Xamanek. In a career that has developed from experimental electronica to dance music and sparse ballads, this record is a conceptual, if not stylistic, follow-up to 2021’s DELIRIO REAL. Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay] dives deeper into their connection with Latin America. The album moves beyond a personal, stylistic and cultural connection to unfurl a metaphysical entanglement with implications for all of us.
Precisely what this means in terms of the music is most clearly articulated on the lead single, Ensemble 2 – Woolly Pianos, a track that draws on sounds, audio treatments and rhythmic figures from Latin dance drums from their last record. But on Woolly Pianos, the recognisability of these musical structures and signifiers is disrupted as they emerge. It is as if, leading with this track, Xamanek is stating what their project is for by deconstructing what made the last record so immediate. This is not a photogenic vacation to fill up a social media account, nor is this a mere trip of cross-cultural discovery that can pad out a job application; this is an encounter with the destabilising forces that have, directly or indirectly, shaped the lives and identities of whoever is listening.
More than human forces over space and time
What might these forces be? Given Xamanek’s previous work, which has explored the overlaps and edges of art, commerce, identity, spirituality and mythology through musical and cultural references (perhaps most clearly exemplified on the track from their last record, Disguised Smize) it becomes a little clearer what they broadly could be. On the one hand, there are the immediate political-economic forces of global capitalism and the insidious forces of colonial history, which structure the stories of who people are through a European norm. On the other, there are the ancient forces of indigenous and mestizo mythologies that animate the matter from which so many other worlds are built.
Taking structural cues from oratorio and opera, production techniques from electroacoustic music and its conceptual orientation from Latin American mythology and storytelling, Xamanek’s record cracks open an Atlantic space of violent and tender relationality. This is to say it traces a fold between places that were invaded by colonial nations and the worlds that they encountered – and destroyed – but cannot settle in with either of these positions. As a Honduran-Danish artist, bringing these mythologies, histories, and ways of being into the present means that Xamanek carries all the tensions they contain into their music.
An uncanny example of this is the non-anglophone accented English of the performers in the recitatives and, in particular, “The Vocal Studies”. On this track, the phonetic articulation of the performers’ European voices as they describe the figure from Latin American mythology of the (“sweet”) snake carries a kind of linguistic friction as they are compelled to make these ideas travel along the paths that capital has made to flow most easily. Compositionally, subtleties like this do a lot to highlight the particularity of Xamanek’s position in this project as one who is constantly moving between worlds.
The sound of disregarded facets of reality
Another key device Xamanek deploys in their production is the precise use of an eerie reverb that holds the music in a plane of reality that is so often denied in Western accounts of the real. Everything has a ghostly echo to it that makes the sound objects feel far enough away to seem unreal but close enough to retain some kind of musical identity.
How this identity is signalled comes out in rhythmic and melodic fragments evocative of different genres that sit uneasily together under the umbrella term, Latin. But they never build up to a stereotypical image. Rather, in the echo, these fragments act on listeners at a distance through both time and space. The effect of this is not just to make the pipes, pianos, and drums into spectres but to dare those who hear these sounds to recognise the ghosts within themselves. This is particularly clear on the Overture – Germinate and Outro – Stay, where the dragged attack of the instruments disrupts the apparent clarity of individual-agency-over-time that “modern” individuals take for granted. These tracks force a shift in which disregarded facets of reality are made audible, allowing the rest of the album to explore worlds that many of us often deny ourselves access to.
A high point of this exploration is Arie 1 – La Sucia. Sung in Spanish – which carries with it a different valence of colonial legacy – it flows from the sounds of the previous track into a polyvocal arrangement punctuated with an almost holographic bass synth. The structure these parts produce refuses any kind of narrative of neat coherence. Instead, much like the record overall, it lingers in a space of uncertainty. A space in which those of us who have always been told we are discreet individuals have to sit as we become more aware of the mythologies of entanglement that modernity has pushed away to make space for its own limited account of reality. On Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay], this account is shown to be another myth, one that would reduce reality to property and obscure the potent possibilities that are right in front of us.
Info: Germinate [Imprint] Wilt [Stay] was released on March 14th from Scorpio Red Records.
Listen to Passive Aggressive Conversations from 2024 with Xenia Xamanek here.
