Words With Crystal Castles

With Crystal Castles’ debut album set for imminent release in the UK, and a recent appearance on teen saga Skins under their belts, the enigma that has shrouded the duo over their four year existence seems destined for removal. Duly Ethan Kath, musical creator and one-half of the Toronto offspring, draws Gigwise into a world of misquotes and encounters.

As the interview begins, the first issue to address in order to avoid confusion later, would be the past errors that have arisen in the press and a particular instance where a report surfaced that the band was ‘an accident’, which the band claim was an incorrect conclusion resulting from discussions of their renowned track, ‘Alice Practice’.

This subject has been revisited repeatedly by the band and now again, so how did this happen Ethan? “For the first two years of us being a band, I had my friends do all the interviews and I told them to make up ridiculous stories. I think one of them said that to a popular magazine and everyone’s been quoting that since”.

On ‘Alice Practice’, their first track, Ethan says, “That was just her [Alice Glass] testing her mic at our very first recording session over one of our loops. We didn’t know that the guy who owned the studio was recording her, so I guess you could call that an accident but the band is NOT an accident.” Does this incident and having to explain yourselves make you wary of the press? “No whatever, who cares, it was my choice to tell friends to do the interviews, right?”

During Crystal Castles live shows, Ethan projects chaotic electronics in a seemingly composed stance from behind his synth, which is a stark contrast to singer, Alice Glass’ onstage persona, who jerks her body over every inch of the stage and it’s this combination that has contributed to their frenzied live reputation. However, this image seems tame as Ethan describes his best band moment; a gig that was cut short when police helicopters arrived on the scene:

“I think my favourite moment was a police helicopter coming to shut down one of our shows in LA. We were playing a house party and it was too loud, it was a factory people were living in. It was too noisy for the people living in the area, so the cops were called and instead of leaving, people just threw their beer bottles at the cops. So, the cops called for back up and the back up came in the form of a helicopter. Everyone got away.”

Despite having just recalled a personal high point Ethan uses this same blasé yet endearing manner for the majority of the interview, therefore questioning whether it could all be taken as tongue-in-cheek. Yet, a disagreeing tone does seep through occasionally, especially when he maintains that Crystal Castles do not belong in the same 8-bit, chip tune genre etched out by bands, such as Knull Sleep and Nintendude that people are readily grouping them with. “No we don’t do that…I don’t know if we fit in to any scene, actually.”

These associations could be attributed to Ethan’s musical experiments involving an Atari. Was there a reason behind this choice of computer? “No it was just there. I think I read something about circuit bending and wanted to try it. I tried it on the Atari that I’d just bought at a garage sale, it was a few dollars. I don’t care about video games; I only bought it because it looked nice!”

What do you think to Crystal Castles’ sound being likened to a videogame soundtrack? “That’s a really lazy thing for people to say, we hate video games.”
How would you define your sound? Pausing to consider this, he replies, “I don’t know, like…if vomit could sing.”