In the evening of the 7th of February 2026, I attended the Eraserhead Xiu Xiu concert at the ICA. Below are the thoughts I wrote up on the train home.
Much of this felt like being in the room next door to Henry's in Eraserhead. The excellent atmospheric ambient sounds in the movie are replicated and built upon. These sounds are occasionally interrupted by bursts of "noise from the other room": heavy breathing and cries from a newborn, a call out of "OKAY PAUL!", and everything being fine in heaven.
The background visuals certainly contributed to the off-kilter, thick atmosphere. The use of fetish imagery compares sexual domination to that of a newborn on their unwilling parent: controlling, defining, dictating their lives. They are both a perversion of the heterosexual/nuclear family ideal: a man who hates his child and does not want to take care of it, and women dressed in cow costumes covered in milk, sex and sexuality utterly removed from their "purpose".
A lot of the strange instruments used made this concert the exact ideal of "experimental". A ball rolling around in a metal tray, a balloon, a hand-crank siren, and of course, the smashing of glass bottles, all give the background ambient noise a layer of strange artifice. The more, shall we say, goofy sounds bring to mind the bumbling Henry, a man lost and anxious in this oppressive world.
This concert really was brilliant and I very much look forward to listening to the recorded version, if there ends up being one.