Xiu Xiu – Eraserhead Xiu Xiu

Eraserhead Xiu Xiu

San Jose duo take on the surreal industrial atmosphere of David Lynch's early masterpiece

“Believe it or not, Eraserhead is my most spiritual film.”

“Elaborate on that.”

“No.”

Almost twenty years ago, while being interviewed for the British Academy for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), beloved surrealist filmmaker, musician, painter and actor David Lynch chuckled when asked to expand on the meaning of a statement made about his 1977 debut feature film, Eraserhead. Watching Lynch’s work, from his aforementioned feature debut through to Inland Empire, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year, down to his final screen work with Twin Peaks: The Return, something Lynch considered more as an 18-hour-long feature rather than standard television series, even the most fair weather viewer can see that there’s no use – or fun – in him dissecting the meaning or intention of his art. Instead, it’s more rewarding to dismantle the work scene-by-scene, sentence-by-sentence to uncover multiple meanings and see what imagery and themes are carried through.

Ahead of Twin Peaks: The Return airing in 2017, picking up from where the original series left audiences in suspense with Agent Cooper’s faith, Xiu Xiu released and successfully toured, The Music Of Twin Peaks, a covers album featuring ‘Audrey’s Dance’, ‘Blue Frank/Pink Room’, and, of course, ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’. That project, made with the blessing of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, was lauded by audiences until the band retired the set in 2018. Demand for them to revisit this material for live shows grew in recent years; however, David Lynch’s unexpected death in 2025, aged 78, spurred them to venture back into a different corner of his art and respond in kind with their distinct musical expression.

In Eraserhead, the Californian experimentalists delve into the monochromatic world inhabited by Henry Spencer, immortalised by frequent Lynch character actor Jack Nance. For the live performance, Xiu Xiu’s Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart are dressed in Henry’s synonymous suit-and-tie look (thankfully, they eschew imitating his electrified hairstyle to avoid satire), as they produce densely drone-focused atmospheric frequencies that persist, in different measures, in the desolate industrial setting of Lynch’s film. Across Xiu Xiu’s Eraserhead, the different tones of modular synths, abrasive drum patches, organ, field recordings and homemade instruments, Seo and Stewart not only pay homage to Lynch’s mind-bending directorial debut, but use this masterful expression (inspired by Lynch’s own terror of becoming a father) to encourage them to push boundaries within their own artistic practice. As they describe it, this immersive body of work can be perceived as “a short-term art installation, an exploded tribute to a cinematic triumph, an epitaph to an idol”.

Absorbing these seven avant-garde sound collages without the accompanying visuals of the duo performing is a challenge and, as one would imagine given that they’re drawing from an experimental horror picture where the antagonist is a slimy limbless baby that won’t stop wailing, is effective in terrorising the listener as sudden jolts of modular synths, fervent electronic arrangements that resemble the whirl of what sounds like a storm of birds flapping their wings, juxtaposed with cartoonish patches that are eventually usurped by an unsettling use of the “OKAY, PAUL!” line from the pencil factory. A line which, in the context of the film, provides a moment of levity and comedy. Another instance of dialogue from the film adding to the tense atmosphere of this work is the distressed loops of “shut up!” from Charlotte Stewart as Mary X in the culminating moments of the nearly 9-minute ‘Sleep Synth’, also featuring an assault of pulsing drum samples, menacing drill-like motifs, snippets of the baby sobbing and a gross wet texture oozing in the background.

As an exercise in taking a revered text within experimental cinema, Xiu Xiu expertly take tonal elements from Eraserhead – Mary’s gnawing jaw as the central component to a fragment of ‘Tetra’s’ 10-minute duration is deeply disturbing, especially when experienced through noise-cancelling headphones – and competently meshes them with electronic textures within the dynamic and darkly toned sonic world they’ve built over fifteen studio albums. The breadth of their musical experimentation, the experience of creating within Xiu Xiu for close to a quarter of a century, comes to a poignant head in the final track of Eraserhead with Jamie Stewart delivering a deeply emotive rendition of ‘In Heaven’, Peter Ivers’ stirring composition, originally sung by Lynch for the film. Allowing space for Stewart’s melancholic cadence to be the central focus, coming at the end of a sometimes relentless (but worthwhile) aural experience, serves as a reminder of the emotion and heart at the core of Lynch’s films. Those aspects of his work aren’t loudly displayed; instead, audiences are rewarded for the care and attention they extend to something like Eraserhead or Twin Peaks. It’s no surprise that two works, in particular, have moved Xiu Xiu to a point of wanting to exist within and expand upon those worlds.