Crystal Castles

by planbmag on Mon, 2008/11/17 - 3:55pm Post to Twitter

On television, a single British man and a married American woman have fallen in love with each other’s Second Life avatar. On the internet, forum-coordinated clans of child hackers are in pitched cyberwar against a Hollywood celebrity cult. On the stereo is Crystal Castles. Disco songs with cold hearts and dead eyes, battered keyboards and vintage arcade games cracked open and pulled apart, but not damaged, remade: as Frankenstein’s monsters, or the demi-human cyborgs of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, wires entering skulls, skin turned to tarnished chrome. There’s a sense of coldness here, but there’s pain too. If dance music aims in part to trigger or replicate moments of chemical euphoria, Crystal Castles seem to evoke a similar but different feeling: of sedation and self-medication, of cuts and breakages kept at arm’s length, through handfuls of pills or long huffs from plastic bags. Their T-shirt is Madonna’s face with a black eye – and I think, wow, that’s perfect.

I’m off to meet Crystal Castles. I go with some trepidation. I’ve been reading a FAQ they have written on the website of their record label where they answer a few simple questions with a mix of brevity, unhelpfulness and arrogance. “Q: Is it true your sound developed from mixing an old arcade machine chip with your keyboard? A: No, I smushed a birthday cake into my keyboard.” “Q: How do you feel about the upcoming 8-bit scene? A: We do not care about the 8-bit scene.” Facts presented not to aid, but to dissuade.

Crystal Castles sit in a dimly lit apartment in Stoke Newington. Vocalist Alice Glass, with brutal bob and kick-ass army boots, grins and swigs lager. Ethan Fawn gazes out impassively from a hoodie and talks with careful neutrality that suggests weariness, or wariness. “By the way, I haven’t slept for two days,” he begins. The first thing I learn is that the album I’ve been listening to – their debut, Crystal Castles – apparently sounds nothing like the finished version, which was mixed by the band’s friend Lexx before Christmas. “We wanted some mixed versions for the promos but I don’t know what the fuck happened,” Ethan explains. “We just wanted it so if you play it loud it sounds as good on the speakers as it does in your headphones.”

Right. Has anyone else helped out on the record?
“No, we’ve stuck to the formula of: I do the music, she does the vocals.”

Alice, do you have any musical input?
Alice: “He writes the tracks and I pick ‘em.”

Ethan, do you make music in solitude?
“Yeah,” slurs Ethan. He’s slumped back on the sofa and his eyes are drooping shut. “At five in the morning. Half-awake and half-asleep.”

So, what equipment do you use? I get the impression you make music from a pretty limited set-up.
“It’s not that limited. I just…find…fuck it, I can’t answer this stuff, I’m asleep. [To Alice] Just tell him what I do.”
Alice grins. Part apologetic, part mischievous.

So is your musical equipment customised?
Ethan: “It’s like, any electronic device, if you open it up and play with the insides, you can get annoying sounds…pretty sounds…[trails off].”
Alice kicks him in the leg: “[Laughing] Do you want me to slap you?”

What sort of mood does Crystal Castles evoke?
Ethan: “You can decide. We just wanted it to be all the same mood.”

Alice, are there defining themes to your lyrics?
Alice: “Not really, every song is different.”

Are they personal to you?
“Well, I wrote them, so I guess.”

Some people would consider songwriting to be a more abstract thing.
“It’s not just how the syllables fit. I can’t say much more than that.”

What’s the lyric you’re happiest about?
She thinks. “Maybe ‘Courtship Dating’. It’s a song about using the bodies of people in taxidermy. A way of preserving them forever.”

Interviewing Crystal Castles feels oddly counter-intuitive: the more you ask, the less you feel you know. So here’s the edited digest. Ethan grew up in Ontario and used to play in a hardcore band called Jakarta, although a quick Google reveals that as recently as 2006, he fronted a Hellacopters-style cock-rock band called Kill Cheerleader (“Kill Cheerleader are an axe to the face of emo!”).

He says he met Alice when the two were performing community service, reading to the blind, and they bonded over their love of local no-wave bands: Skingraft’s AIDSWolf, 5RC’s The Sick Lipstick. Alice invited Ethan to see her noise-rock band, Fetus Fatale, and impressed, he asked her to sing on his new project, electronic productions pieced together on vintage equipment and modified circuit boards.

“I hate new equipment. I hate anything you can buy from the store with pre-set sounds,” he says. “My favourite instrument is a circuit board from the late Sixties, early Seventies which teaches college students to work circuit boards – it makes this weird blip sound to tell you that you’re wrong.”

The result of Alice’s first vocal warm-up, ‘Alice Practice’, became their first single on London’s Merok Records, the blogs went crazy – and the
rest, the rest is all zeros and ones.

Technology is ostensibly there to make everything easy, but I wonder if our relationship with technology these days is that it fails, it breaks, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Is there any of that in Crystal Castles?
Alice: “Um…we get spam messages all
the time.”
Ethan: “Technology’s never failed us.”

What’s been your favourite live show?
Ethan: “All of them. All of them are great.”

I think back to a post on the Plan B Forum which took issue with Crystal Castles’ live show in Brighton, which accused them of refusing to put on a show, of sneering, of throwing beer. I ask, do you ever attempt to appear confrontational?
Ethan scoffs: “Attempt to? No. We just do what we do.”

Well, is there any appeal to appearing confrontational?
Ethan: “I don’t even understand that question.”

I mean, do you ever want to push people away – to annoy or appal?
Ethan: “We just wanna play our songs…live.”
Alice: “Riots are always better. There’s been some fucked-up shows. Speakers falling on kids. Security being fucking assholes.”
Ethan: “There was a show where people kept jumping onstage with her like she was Morrissey in the Eighties. They had to get six security guys to form a chain. Kids were still jumping over the security guards to touch her. So the security guards started getting violent towards the kids. One kid got his head broken open. Once we played a house party and it was too loud and the neighbours called the cops – but instead of people leaving they thought it’d be a good idea to throw beer bottles.”