Xentos Fray Bentos

Biographic Insights - toward an appreciation of the many lives and fragmented psyches of Xentos Fray Bentos

“I was born in the Wicklow Hills at a very young age. My father abandoned us soon after my emergence from the womb to join other Irish slave labourers in the construction of the British motorway system. It was left to the mother to smuggle me into England in her pelt. On arrival, she threw herself to the ground and proclaimed a miraculous birth. This was how I came to be in possession of a UK passport.”

These few lines, taken from Xentos practically untenable and unerringly scandalous auto-biography, conveys some flavour of the contemptuous/tempestuous times into which he was born. After several failed attempts at an education, he was taken under the Essex wing of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Notion, an obscure branch of the order of Franciscan nuns. Slowly, under a reign of blows and religious brutality that would make a stay in Guantanamo Prison seem akin to a Club 18/60 holiday spa experience, he learned to rein it in (his bad habits) and became devoted to the study of stringed instruments. At first, the piano and electric bass were his chosen weapons. Chancing on an abandoned upright piano in the nearby church hall, he became entranced by the ‘out-of-tuneness’ of the battered old keyboard and, using a rusty pair of pliers, quickly developed a tuning system of his own based loosely on the noteworthy quarter tone interval.

Unable to make contact with adherents and active practitioners of the quarter tone system, he struck out on his own, and for a while earned his living performing detuned classics and vulgar sea shanties in working man’s clubs in the North of England. It was within these clubs that Xentos was first encouraged to explore his many alter egos. Two of the most popular stage characters he occupied in this era included ‘Luigi’ - a faltering and incompetent Italian motor mechanic and ‘Bethsheba (sic)’ - an exotic/erotic female dancer. His immediate success with the latter eventually led to a long engagement in the European underground club scene. During this Mid 1980s period, Xentos could be caught performing on stage regularly in Paris, Mariánské Lázně and Athens. He enjoyed a feted life and earned a grand living impersonating female pop stars of the day including Madonna, Toyah and Cyndi Lauper. Such was his skill at eliding the edges of the narrowly gendered perimeters of the time and embracing the liminal, that he was asked to portray a Marilyn Monroe-type figure in a low budget indie movie. Hair, make up and styling were completed and Xentos, now looking the part, found himself fascinated with the mechanics of the film-making process. Unfortunately, he had been duped. The script turned out to be ‘une escroquerie’ and the intended film a particularly cheap and lurid attempt at pornography. Disgusted, Xentos stormed off the set and decided to hang up his vast collection of wigs, heels and gowns for the time being.

Returning to the UK, having loudly declared cinema to be ‘his new god’, Xentos was gifted a super 8 camera by one of Derek Jarman’s relatives and spent two years making idiosyncratic movies that breezily pre-dated the excesses of the MTV and Vimeo scene. His movie work - and the concomitant need for soundtracks that would complete his vision sparked an interest in electronic music. In particular, like an itinerant zombie, he was drawn toward the field of Schaefferian acousmatics. This practise saw him spend the first of many gruelling tours of duty ensconced inside that airless and artificial sonic tomb - the recording studio. Xentos curiously easy relationship with celebrity and its disciples came in handy. Despite the enduring, almost hermetic anonymity that defines the core of Xentos practice, various well-known names were drawn into his orbit. At first, thanks to the intervention of small label owner Dick O’Dell, he was loaned legacy equipment by Dutch composer Dick Raaijmakkers. Raaijmakkers, a shamefully unacknowledged master was at that time in the wilderness. His all-too-eager embrace of Sino-Marxist politics had resulted in his being eclipsed from the local scene. Next, Gina Birch from the Raincoats stepped up, insisting Xentos make use of her Tascam four track cassette machine while she was off on tour. As if this wasn’t enough, actor/comedian Keith Allen of Sheriff of Nottingham fame arrived on Xentos doorstep one morning with a complete 8 track recording studio, a set up he’d somehow scammed out of Chrysalis Records in exchange for a comedy album that never materialised.

Much as he enjoyed exploring the possibilities implicit in a taped environment, Xentos perceived new technologies were on the horizon, developments that would enable him to realise the sounds crystallising inside his skull. Fortuitously, this moment in audio history coincided with the development of the commercial sampling device. Like an untested army sapper who rapidly discovers concourse with the lethally timed explosive through the art of defusing, in short order Xentos became fluent in the possibilities of both the Emulator II and the Akai S900. The timing couldn’t have been better. He was in the throes of discovering the bliss of bird lore. Repeated journeys to thickets, marshes, tidal estuaries and densely coated forests, armed only with a second hand Uher tape machine and a hastily borrowed Sennheiser MKH 816 (an unusual mic in that it employs an RF module to carry the capsule signal to the output circuitry) allowed Xentos to build up hours of semi-professionally recorded avian audio. Xentos found that by feeding short snippets of birdsong into his S900, he could reduce the pitch down by three whole octaves. By resampling and reseeding, the three could become six. The corporeal yet animated profligacy of his subsequent ‘bird-brained’ mixtapes led to a European tour facilitated by Rotterdam guitar virtuoso Lukas Simonis. It was during a residency in Hamburg that he first met up with sonic pioneer and ace bricoleur Lepke Büchwater. After a brief conversation, Xentos decided to place his glitzy g-strings and dazzling high heels in temporary mothballs and the duo returned to the UK to form the conceptual appropriation outfit Die Trip Computer Die. Only now being released in stages on Bandcamp, the Die Trip archive consists of over sixty six hours of recordings. After some algorithmic highs and capriciously low jinx, Xentos started work on his as yet unpublished journals, a unique documentary of an unstable age, which at this current time stretches to thirty four volumes.

During the late 90s, Xentos’ fascination in radio was kindled by the first incarnation of Resonance FM curated by Phil England and Ed Baxter. Broadcasting from the roof of the Festival Hall, part of London’s brutalist South Bank complex, the station initiated a free-flowing, anything goes philosophy that is still emulated today. In addition to helping practitioners realise their productions for the station, Xentos hosted a Sunday morning religious show that incorporated an ironically perfect mimicry of the more hysterical American TV preachers along with a cascades of found sound and archive recordings of a biblical nature.

No sooner had Resonance FM returned as a permanent gleaming lighthouse on the shores of the radio landscape, than Xentos was ready with a weekly half hour show. Resonance founder Ed Baxter described it as ‘a rollicking madcap picaresque conceptual comedy’. The show, which seamlessly mixed scripts, sound collage, intervention and psychic disturbances ran for three years until Xentos, who also moonlighted as a sound designer creating original soundtracks and soundscapes for The Science Museum, Tate Modern, The V&A and others, under the relentless pressure, completely lost his mind. He was picked up on Morecambe Beach, dressed in rags and talking to a shrub. His interlocutors discovered that he was trying to convince the shrub that the world was about to end in a colossal nuclear fist fight.

Recovery was slow if progressive and when Xentos awoke from his fairy flux, he found the world had changed indelibly. For a while he laboured in the field of education, determinedly passing on his skills in both radio and moving image to the next generation of creatives. (It was while lecturing at one college during a major upgrade to the Windows operating system that Xentos cracked his now globally famous Microsoft/Warner Bros. joke: “What’s up, Docx?”

Ultimately, small-minded attacks on the heart of education by the snooty toffs of the incoming Tory government (under the aegis of ‘austerity’) led to him departing the sector in disgust but not before he had inserted a 20,000 line abstract poem outlining has angst and unbridled rage at these disgusting political charlatans into the college’s database. By a typical Xentossian coincidence, as he left the building for the last time he found him self pursued by two heads of department clutching pages of printout of said poem. “Xentos? What have you done this time?” demanded one of the heads. “What needed to be done,” replied a cool, collected Xentos.

For a short time, Xentos chilled his heels before returning to live performance with the Unhappy Fly collective, clocking up a series of memorable low key shows in Berlin and beyond. His current period has seem him producing spoken word series for Resonance (The Diaries of Xentos Fray Bentos) and individual radio dramas for the likes of Radiophrenia in Scotland. A degree of interest in his archive musical projects has ignited various projects. The Emotional Response label in Arizona is soon to re-issue ‘Go Home Soldier’ by Amos & Sara, originally released on the It’s War Boys label as a 12” single. Emotional will follow this with the first release of a Ted Barrow and Xentos project from 2012 - Two Square Why’s (2SQY?) album of unsettlingly nostalgic retrograde songs. The Spanish label Transgenero are also busy on an inspired release that will twin one of Xentos’ mid-period collections of short stories ‘The Disturbex’ (featuring a prologue by Luke Fowler) with three EPs containing unreleased material from the It’s War Boys catalogue including Narki Brillans, Amos & Sara and The Harris Bomb (feat. Tweed Klausewitz).

Having recently completed a soundtrack for The Glass Museum in Stourbridge that saw the tip of one of his boom microphones overheating in close proximity to molten glass, Xentos is currently hard at work devising his contribution to Esch. The programme, set in the Year of Culture 2122 - exactly one hundred years hence - should throw up no surprises for those who keep their ears pressed tight to the rails, rafters and railings.