XIU XIU Xiu Xiu was born on a dance floor, arriving alone at the club and going home alone from the club. Over the course of 15 7"s, five EPs, six collaboration albums and eight full lengths Xiu Xiu has never shied away from any topic that is honest and meaningful to them. Their songs are about gender dysphoria, suicide, loneliness, going insane, child soldiers, the tsunami in Indonesia, hideous sex, the Sanrio character Pandapple, abortion politics, incest, cats, queer life, being raped by the police and the individual responsibility of U.S. military personnel for the families they murder. Somehow within all of this, cuteness attempts to find a way to embrace death and horrible emotion. The music is drawn from British post punk and synth pop, modern Western classical, noise and experimental musics, Asian percussion musics, American folk, torch singers, house, techno, 1950s rock n roll and this second"s top 40. Xiu Xiu have been called "self flagellating", "harsh", "brutal", "shocking", and "perverse" but also "genius", "brilliant", "unique", "imgainative" and "luminous." LAWRENCE ENGLISH Lawrence English is composer, media artist, and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English"s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. English utilises a variety of approaches including live performance and installation to create works that ponder subtle transformations of space and ask audiences to become aware of that which exists at the edge of perception.