MOODBOARD by @xcrswx

@xcrswx is the duo of Crystabel Efemena Riley (human/drum-skin) and Seymour Wright (saxophone) both also working with digital, analogue and ANDROID technologies – live and in the studio. Together they create sound works, and ideas that they explain, are to do with: “(REFERENCES) a span of human traditions, technologies and applications from the menstrual-bloody origins of cosmetics through evolution of reeds/drumskin ritual/musics, to Samsung and Audacity tools and attachments, Crunchyrolls and sub-woofer succulence. It’s committed, collaborative work that draws on decades of other association (past and present: X-Ray Hex Tet, Maria & The Mirrors, GUO, أحمد [Ahmed], XT trios with Anne Gillis and RPBoo) and (MORE REFERENCES) glamour/talent, clean-beauty, smart-boards, teaching-teams, stages, studios and solos, but in terms of what comes out is a sui generis, exciting, radical, extreme, tender, physical and fresh synthesis, of beats, layers, and patterns of raw and polished sound”.*

MOODBOARD is @xcrswx’s first 12” LP, following on from FIXES a 10” split (with Lolina) from 2023 and CALLTIME/HARD OUT, a 7” single from 2020 it completes a trilogy of releases on Feedback Moves. It extends the previous releases in exciting, new ways – presenting things on a scale where everything is greater, with extremes wider, rawer and deeper than on previous recordings. MOODBOARD is one long-form piece played across two sides, and, a suite of discrete, overlapping songs – OKIE EFE, NPC, P2W, REFERENCES, MORE REFERENCES, UFFIZI, THE CREATIVE DECK, OKIE EFE IVẸ – pulsing with the intensity of one of @xcrswx’s extraordinarily intense, physical, caring and socially-situated live shows, but employing hi- and lo-tech studio assembly, intervention, and re-invention to keep these two sides very much, and meticulously, produced – a record made.

The MOODBOARD whole is a product of @xcrswx’s iterative, on-going process of site-specific working – the LIVE and ANDROID. It captures the unique power of an @xcrswx concert, but also documents the slowly assembled, preparation of ideas, patterns and play that goes into each performance and constitutes their lived, evolving work and practice. Grown out of, under and around live recordings from a Brussels residency in 2023 MOODBOARD sees these refined, re-worked, reversed, paused, masked, made over and made up to mix real-time and studio-time sources with organic, pragmatic resolve. It’s moving music (for body and brain). The titles contain: “the bottom-less codes, emotions, energy and needs of domestic, professional and family life-worlds” that flow through and shape all of what goes into @xcrswx, “containing and bringing up work, care, learning, family, office, studio, venue, school and home”.

Dancing your head in MOODBOARD is frazzled and inspired, frazzling and inspiring, moonfull of celebration, protest, memorial, enquiry, tribute, surprise, making and dissent – vital, committed.

*(As one past review had it, if you want:

like free jazz improv happening in another room while bone rattling subs are piped straight to your brain. Think something like Chris Corsano and Peter Brötzmann in one ear, with Mika Vainio and Eleh in the other.)