| « Life in a Few Stolen Moments | Wilco's new album gets welcome reception in rare intimate venue appearance » |
Concert Sat May 12 2007
Three-quarters alien, and no signs of stopping
Tonight: XYIMALLOO, Panicsville, Silvum, Walter Carson, Caves
Location: Nihilist, 2255 S. Michigan, apt 4E (ring buzzer)
Date/time: Tonight (May 12), 8 p.m.
Cost: $5
Please put down your Shaggs bendable action figures, turn off your Daniel Johnston interactive adventure game (just....just save your location then, OK?), and for God's sake, take off those damn Wild Man Fischer plush slippers and hie thine ass down to Chinatown tonight - there's something happening here that is much much MUCH more important than your weekly date with Roky Erickson's ouija board.
For the past 30 years, the musician XYIMALLOO (nee Naofumi Ishimaru), a musician so far outside of the "outside" that using the awful, codified term "outsider art" feels so, so insulting, has been blowing a couple hundred minds per country (his best known release was an LP retrospective on Old Gold about 10 years ago) with tape after tape (and lately, CDr) of completely personal, affectless, ORIGINAL music that seems to be without precedent or follower. YXIMALLOO's muse seemed to be born with himself, and I see nobody really picking up the flag, so I suspect it'll die with YXIMALLOO (but you better see him live before that happens!).
Using broken guitars, homemade folk instruments, and very, very, VERY old casio keyboards, he's created his own one-man folk music - Jad Fair at his most shambolic is sort of a reasonable comparison, so it's no surprise that the two of them collaborated on two CDs in the '90s ("Half Robot" and "Half Alien"), but really, XYIMALLOO's skin glows green, while Jad's just kind of gets paler by the year.
I mean really, I can mix metaphors and sputter on about this all night. I can tell you that he played a performance in the bathroom of an auto plant in Japan - not as a revolutionary gesture, but just for fun ("I was not saying 'buy this kind of car' or 'don't buy this kind of car.' I was just playing my music."). But for crying out loud, just check out those Myspace samples - that should be all the proof you need. Get a babysitter, cancel your dinner plans, get down to south Michigan Ave, ring 4E on the buzzer, pay the man $5, and luxuriate in true sideways beauty.
Also on the bill will be Nihilist's own Panicsville, a nightmare of latex and big synth tones; Silvum, that golden-toned somnambulator from Champaign, IL; and another pair of touring monsters, Walter Carson and Caves, from Lexington, KY. $5, and you get to keep the mug.
