She's named for the Greek enchantress Circe, and this dark popstar is creating a mythological tangle of sound. On her twenty-minute debut EP She's Made Of Saints, Circe writes a world in which dystopia and reality co-exist.
Here, she takes us through each of the six tracks...
'She’s Made of Saints'
This introduction track was the last thing I wrote, which was actually the last day before the computer I had made everything on blew up. I love the romance of that - my computer decided the EP was finished.
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When all the songs were done, I was looking at each track, thinking about the hours and hours of work that went into making each precious sound. Seeing them sitting as these tiny files on my screen, I felt a parental urge to wrap it up and give it an identity of some kind, so I made this intro track to pull it all together. I wrote this song by re-sampled my voice from different parts of all the songs on the EP.
'Ten Girls'
So, I had just finished watching a harrowing scene from the TV show The Handmaid's Tale. One of the characters Emily (Ofglen) runs over a guard with a stolen truck as a retaliation to the brutal violence she had suffered, the music playing behind is Johan Johansson’s ‘Part 5/ The Sun's Gone Dim And The Sky's Turned Black’ and that scene has to be one to the most powerful and moving things I have ever watched. Every time I thought I’d stopped crying, I’d think of it and start up again. It’s a moment of euphoric defiance with a literal revving car-wheel of freedom.
Moments afterward I sat at my piano and wrote the first demo of 'Ten Girls' whilst the rest of that episode played out on my laptop. The words that tumbled out of my salty tear-filled mouth that day, pretty much all stayed right up til the final master. Atwood’s dystopian legend helped me tell my own, one of a fractured internet generation; a feminist piece of work, sound-tracking the apocalyptic life of a womxn living in the #metoo and #timesup era. I wanted to tell this story but have that same euphoric ending of this scene - no More, not me, not my girls - with the final line in the song being "There will not be Ten Girls Here after me, I will break this fantasy”.
'Ruined Your Sons'
Ruined your sons is my metaphorical B side to Ten Girls. If Ten Girls was a call-to-arms for womxn-kind, Ruined Your Sons looks at Toxic Masculinity - how did we get so lost? The song journeys through a story of the male gaze, battling with a sensitivity I believe/hope is buried beneath the surface of it all. Society's obsession with hyper-masculine performance and bravado, how it destroys the inherent sensitivity we are born with.
Sonically, the song started with me sampling the sound of sirens and creating my own with my favorite weird little instrument the korg volca keys. I also love the drama of a helicopter, so I spent ages trying to record one whenever they flew over my bedroom. A big sonic reference to this song was a scene from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet when Romeo is running to Juliet's tomb. Manic levels of passion and confusion.
“Check her reflection, she is made of saints” This is the track that gave me the title of the EP.
'Dancer'
This song to me is one enormous sad exhale. The lyrics read like someone listing arguments to try and prove the notion "You don’t really love me". The story I was telling was one I had found in a documentary, ‘The Source Family’ about a cult started by a man named Father Yod. He started a radical experiment in 1970s with a concept of a kind of utopian living. One of the women involved talked about how she gave up all ownership of herself for this man - even the act of dancing. That always stuck with me – the thought someone could surrender their own movement for someone they completely believed was good for them.
My whole life I’ve been interested in ‘cults’, the fascination comes from me finding parallels with my own life, how unbalanced love can be, that it can actually feel like it's out of the realms of our human control. I think I did subconsciously warn myself here too, writing ‘I could have been a dancer.’ Don't give anything up of yourself to anyone who doesn't deserve it.
'I Don’t Wanna Die Here'
'Cause you’re holy and I’m so lonely’ - I was very much going through a time where I was trying to finding hope in a… dangerous place.
Lyrically it was me trying to muddle through some dark thoughts. I went to my studio with a basic demo on guitar I think and I remember putting it on loop and sitting on at the drums very instinctually just smashing the hell out of the toms and I was like, okay I get this: I’m gonna write something to pull me out of this dark place. So the music ended up being an Ennio Morricone-style orchestra picking up my sad demo and shaking it back to life. I added layers and layers of different instruments and the building velocity of the strings and drums are its (emotional) saving grace, and ultimately it finds its peace.
'Steve Harrington'
As the name probably reveals, it’s my ode to Micheal Stein and Kyle Dixon’s ‘Stranger Things’ soundtracks. Once again, I wrote this song in a shaky state of ‘what did I just go through’ after watching a scene from season one where the group of friends watches on as the supposed dead body of their best friend Will is being pulled out of the water, to the soundtrack of Peter Gabriel cover of Heroes by Bowie. Production-wise these two albums taught me so much, that Circe will forever reference and be rooted in what I learned from them. The stuff I make is quite often described as movie music and for this song I think I took that element of my writing to the maximum level.
