About Xenia Rubinos' Black Terry Cat
The album Black Terry Cat by singer-songwriter and multi instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos is now in stores. With a delightfully unique and empowering sound that Spin recently described as “multi-genre-hyphenate instrumental textures beneath Billie Holiday-esque croons” and inspired DIY to declare, ”Once Xenia Rubinos begins to sing, nothing else matters,” the talented Rubinos uses her soulful voice to traverse an array of genres from R&B to Hip-Hop to jazz and beyond, all of delivered with a New York punk-funk abandon.
Rubinos was recently profiled in New York’s Village Voice, who said of a recent live performance, “Her energy was like a flame: fitful, glowing, and fiery. Her voice was, as always, a multifaceted wonder.
To accompany Black Terry Cat’s release, Rubinos collaborated with director Simon Benjamin to create a series of evocative visualizers that perfectly mirror the feel of photographer Joseph Rodriguez’s album cover.
Director Benjamin explains, “I saw creating the visualizers for the album as an opportunity to expand the look and feeling of Joseph Rodriguez’s photography for the album cover which feels distinctly New York. The custom nameplates that Xenia had made for the song titles were also too good not to use. We took the nameplates off of the chains and floated them in familiar everyday spaces around New York City – re-contextualizing the pendant and making it into a typographic title with the city serving as a textural background element.”
Rubinos adds, “I’ve been a fan of Simon’s work and wanted a subtle moving image to just help you vibe out with the music, like a night light that’s on while you're dreaming. I was imagining the nameplates as these high fashion jewelry pieces that you see in a Tiffany’s display window, except my window is the city and my jewelry is from the Fulton Street mall in Brooklyn.”
The album finds Rubinos assisted by longtime drummer Marco Buccelli, who produced the album, and Jeremy Loucas as engineer. The three worked an average of 16-17 hours a day for five months to complete the record which is named after “a giant black scraggly cat” that surprised Rubinos one cold night in Brooklyn.