Press quotes about Sxip Shirey

New Yorkers are perpetually trying to explain the musical gazingstock that is Sxip. Their eyes grow big as saucers and they wave their hands around, emitting odd tones of pleasure and emphatic non sequiturs such as "A bowlike thing with a tampon applicator, utterly transcendent" before sagging from the effort and saying simply, "I guess you'll just have to go see him."
 
The first time I saw Sxip he was peeling old chewing gum off of hunks of sidewalk and channeling the voices and the songs trapped therein, seemingly impervious to the black sludge dribbling down his chin. He's one of those musicians who see potential and beauty in detritus and shrapnel. As a collector of lost things and constructor of never-before-heard noise, Sxip has served as musical director for the Bindlestiff Cirkus and appeared with the Daredevil Opera Company at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., leaving a legion of slack-jawed critics in his wake.
 
With a musical arsenal that includes the industrial flute, the mutant harmonica, the obnoxiophone, the triple-extended penny whistle, a miniature hand-bell choir, and a regurgitated music box, he conjures a world of infernal calliopes and cotton candy machetes wielded by Gypsy crones with angel feet.