Xylouris White is George playing Cretan lute and Jim playing drums. They first met in Melbourne, come from different musical backgrounds yet have much in common which is evident when they get together and play live or record in the studio. George comes from a lively tradition and Jim, now based in New York has been playing in his own unmistakable style for decades with Venom P. Stinger, Dirty Three, The Double, Springtime, Bill Callahan and Marisa Anderson to name a few. They work closely with Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto as producer of all their albums: Goats, Black Peak, Mother, The Sisypheans and The Forest In Me.


Short Quote Biography


Xylouris White… remain trailblazing outliers with a supernatural power to express themselves as one…

Their visceral interplay and spirit is a highly rare, magical and mysterious one, and with ‘Mother’, their third consecutive collaboration with Fugazi's Guy Picciotto, they've dispatched another compelling set of clues.-Vish Khanna - Exclaim



The New York Times, By Ben Ratliff

Both Born to the Form, a Couple of Continents and Major Traditions Apart

Xylouris White, the duo of Jim White and George Xylouris

When the lute player George Xylouris was a teenager — growing up in a mountain village on Crete, not far from the Ideon Cave, where Zeus worshipers have been making pilgrimages since the end of Minoan civilization — he was working as accompanist to his father, the folkloric singer and lyrist Antonis Xylouris. When the Australian drummer Jim White was a teenager, he was playing in a Melbourne noise band called the People With Chairs Up Their Noses.

It’s good that they’ve ended up together. Both are extraordinary musicians. From a distance, in market terms, one is a traditional artist and the other a nontraditional one. (Mr. Xylouris has mostly stayed within the music of his culture and family; since the early 1990s, Mr. White has been the drummer for the great instrumental trio Dirty Three.) But up close, during a set at Union Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Thursday night, the difference was negligible. Onstage, as Xylouris White, they look and play like brothers.

…It’s intense, joyous, rugged music…



Rolling Stone Xylouris White: The Parish, Austin, Texas , March 17th 2018

David Fricke

..Xylouris White…are master musicians bonded by enduring friendship. .. (this was).. my third, live exposure to the duo in five months after dazzling gigs in Iceland and Brooklyn ... the dancing broke out right away as Xylouris and White locked into a rolling, modal thunder that I have already compared to the Middle Eastern psychedelia of the American late-Sixties band Kaleidoscope but which also evokes the empathy and elevation of saxophonist John Coltrane’s iconic 1967 duets with drummer Rashied Ali, released in 1974 as Interstellar Space.
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