Words With Crystal Castles

The video game references have also derived and accelerated from Crystal Castles the 80s arcade game, a coincidence of which Ethan says, “We knew nothing about that game and I still haven’t seen it,” before providing an insight in to the real origins of the band’s name, cartoon heroine and He-Man’s sister, She-Ra, Princess Of Power: “We’ve never actually watched an episode of She-Ra, but when I was a kid I had a female cousin whose favourite toy was The Crystal Castle [She-Ra’s mystical refuge] and nothing gave her more joy. I’ve never seen anyone happier in my life, so it always stuck with me, this castle.”

As for Crystal Castles’ own home, Toronto, a city which has introduced us to the likes of, Broken Social Scene, Tokyo Police Club and Metric, Ethan believes their dwelling bears no musical relevance to the band, and is merely a place where he and Alice met (reportedly while doing community service): “We’ve never paid attention to the Toronto scene. All we did was meet at this place where you read to the blind. We met in that building that happened to be in Toronto, but Toronto has nothing to do with our music.

“We were reading to the blind and we started chatting because we were the only young people there. We started talking about music and agreed on our favourite bands. She told me that I should come and see her band called Foetus Fatale, which I did. I’d already been working on my own songs, but when I saw her I thought that she was the missing ingredient in my music.”

Has your music changed over the time you have been together? “We had a vision for what we wanted to sound like and we’ve stuck to it.”

Back to the new album, also called Crystal Castles, Ethan ambiguously reveals, “You can expect new sounds, new songs.” Their debut also contains early track ‘Alice Practice’, current single ‘Air War’, and the band’s remix of Health’s ‘Crimewave’.

Ethan explains how the remix happened: “Three years ago we wanted to do a tour with Health and they had an idea that we should sell a 7” where they cover us on their side and we cover them on our side. I didn’t want to cover them but I did like the vocal track from ‘Crimewave’ and I had a Crystal Castles song that I could add the vocal track to. They sent me the vocal track and I put it over the song but it didn’t work at all, so I started chopping it up and re-arranging it, and I just couldn’t make it work. I sent it to them saying, ‘I can’t do anything with this’, but they said that they liked it and everyone agreed it was great. We ended up putting it out even though I thought it didn’t work.”

Along with the Health remix, Ethan has a back catalogue of bands he has also remixed, including, The Klaxons and Bloc Party, among others. Remixes aside, how do the dynamics within the duo work when it comes to Crystal Castles’ music? “We both have freedom over our parts. I create the music and give her a CD with the songs and she can choose songs to sing over and she can sing whatever she wants on them. I trust her because I saw her in her previous band and loved everything she was doing, and I thought anything she would do over my tracks would be great.”

As the band prepare to release their album, does Ethan have any thoughts on what is happening in the current music scene? “I’m not really paying attention right now, we’ve been on tour for two years and I haven’t had time to check out new bands, you know. If someone wants to make me a mix CD, and let me know what’s happening that would be nice…”

Well, that sounds like an invitation, any offers Gigwise readers?