In March 2010, the composer and singer Xenia Rubinos, who is twenty-eight, returned to Brooklyn after a trip to Hallandale, Florida. She had gone there to move her father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, into a nursing home. Using a Nord keyboard that her family had given her for Christmas and a Boss looping pedal, she started to make what she calls “stupid songs.” Although she had studied music in college for three years, and wrote notated music for orchestral instruments like trombones, she hadn’t created a pop song since high school. She discovered that all of her training fit into a compact form. “Writing music at that moment was like lighting myself on fire,” she said. Later that year, at Bushwick Open Studios, she played keyboard and sang at the same time, a first. She started playing regularly with the drummer Marco Buccelli, and their début album, “Magic Trix,” which was released earlier this year, by Ba Da Bing! Records, has received positive responses from NPR and the Chicago Reader.
Rubinos was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, by her Cuban father and Puerto Rican mother. At a panel discussion in July, she said, “I was in a household that liked their salsa, merengues, and rumbas. Some of those rhythms find their way to shake through the cheese grater of my mind.” But what comes out hews to no single rhythmic pattern. Rubinos has a voice like the view through a bay window, expansive and mutable; Buccelli plays the drums with a determined specificity, as if reminding his kit every few bars of what it was meant to do. Rubinos works with a small sampler, which she uses to trigger recordings of the sound of her own voice, keyboard parts, and a creaky door. The result is rhythmically fierce, vocally generous music that slips through the net of any known genre. Onstage, Rubinos wears a tank dress, as well as heels that come off early in the show. Buccelli leans into his set as if nobody else were in the room, and, almost imperceptibly, works with a pedal board to alter the sound of his amplified snare. In particularly intense moments, Rubinos’s flange of black curls acts like a third band member, reacting in waves.
Rubinos’s lyrics tend to be concrete, as if to push back against the elegantly uneven nature of the music. Some songs are in Spanish, but the ode to intimacy “When You Come” is written in English: “I would like to gather up a couple of good sticks and build you a nest, and lay you an egg straight into your mouth.” Rubinos said recently, “I feel that in totality, my experience and this record are very American.” Rubinos and Buccelli will play almost all of “Magic Trix” and new material that Rubinos describes as “Shellac meets Andre 3000” in a cozy experimental space at the back of the Cameo Gallery (93 N. 6th St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-302-1180), on Sept. 20. ♦
