If I had one pound for every time I saw a skinny-jeans-clad boy in London wearing a Crystal Castles t-shirt, I’d have, well, three pounds. Or six dollars, when you convert it back to the good old Canadian dollar. Six dollars, however, is more than I had to pay to see Crystal Castles last night at Vice’s Festival Ball, a free open-bar fête held in honour of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Doors opened at 8 p.m. at U of T’s Hart House and the band hit the stage around 12 a.m. By the time they came on, the crowd was wasted and sloppy. Same goes for the band but I guess that’s their style. Intermittently in the crowd, the who’s who of Canadian music popped up including Jesse Keeler formerly of DFA1979, now of MSTRKRFT and the boys of Team Canada. The room was only about half-full probably because the other half was outside soaking up the last of the fancy hors d’oeuvres, alcohol and summer weather.

Before I left for the Netherlands, I interviewed Crystal Castles for the magazine I was interning for at the time. Said magazine changed mastheads and my article never got to see the light of day. Perhaps it was for the better because after having written it Exclaim magazine revealed band member Ethan Kath was actually Claudio Palmieri. When I met him I called him Claudio, the name his publicist used to refer to him in email. He corrected me telling me Claudio was a nickname his parents gave him in honour of their favourite Italian opera singer. He told me to refer to him as Ethan Kath, a name he wrote down for me, and put an end to this whole Claudio confusion.

So in tribute to mine and Crystal Castles’ homecoming, I am posting my interview. How much of it is truth and how much is digital false fact? Only Claudio knows. Oh and sources tell me that Alice Glass is actually Maggie Osbourne from North Toronto Collegiate Institute.

Crystal Castles plays Circa on October 24 or see them in Utrecht, my former Dutch home, at Tivoli de Helling on September 20.

photo credit: crystal castles

She-Ra calls the Crystal Castle her home but Crystal Castles, the band, are glad to finally be without one.“It was always a bitch coming up with money to pay rent,” says Ethan Kath, one-half of the Toronto-based electro-dance duo. “I was always a few dollars short. I would always have to figure out some scheme to make money to pay rent which is what led to me meeting Alice.”

Kath was caught stealing and sentenced to community service where he met Alice Glass, his future bandmate. Glass had been living in an abandoned house with her friends until the police found out.

“They had all escaped but this one girl had gone back to get her shit, which was really stupid because the cops were there,” says Kath. “Because the one girl had gone back, they all got caught because of her.”

While Kath and Glass paid their debt to society, they bonded by talking about music. After hearing Kath’s songs for the first time, Glass left her band, Fetus Fatales, to join him. Together they’ve made some of the most glitched-out music this side of the Atlantic.

Since then two N-words that have been used heavily in conjunction with the band: Nu-rave and Nintendo.

The first is a label Kath vehemently denies.

“There are no elements of rave in our music or the way we look even. I would never wear fluorescent,” says Kath, who is wearing a burgundy sweatshirt with yellow leaves printed on it.

The only reason he thinks his friends the Klaxons got hit with the nu-rave label is because fans bring glowsticks to their shows. Furthermore, he’s not sure why both bands are lumped together musically.

“They were basically a guitar indie band and we’re an experimental dance band. I don’t think there’s any band that sounds like Klaxons or any band that sounds like us. We don’t even sound like each other, but we both have that creativity.”

The second N is a misconception. For the record, Kath hates video games and says he has only sampled sounds from Atari, never Nintendo. But sampling vintage video games, he says, shouldn’t be mistaken as a tribute to the past.

“That’s not retro and sentimental. That’s taking old, dead machines and trying to bring them back to life, even for a few minutes,” says Kath.

“I don’t want to have any sounds that you can buy in a store, so I specifically look for old equipment. Because when you start fucking with broken instruments they start making sounds that they’re not supposed to make.”

Nostalgia is a surprisingly sore subject for a band named after an 80s cartoon and whose merch features a silkscreen of Madonna, albeit sporting a black eye.

“It’s like a giant fuck-you to the past. We hate retro bands. We wish that all bands could be innovative and move forward. So the shirt is just a symbol for that.”

posted by vicky at 9:55 pm under Music
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