By Lindsey Evan Holliday
What do you get when you mix community service punishments, circuit bending, Madonna, and a measly $300? Crystal Castles. Mmhmm. Ethan Kath is creating the most popular 8-bit synth chiptunes ever while Alice Glass puts the screaming poetry cherry on top. Whether you call it Thrash, Electro, Hyphy, Metal, Techno, or Experimental, Crystal Castles are on fire right now—just ask the 13 year-olds in pink I met in the bathroom at their show.
URB: So how did you and Alice Glass meet?
Ethan Kath: We were both doing community service punishments.
For what?
I was in a heavy metal band and we had booked a US tour, I get to the border, and they discover that I have a criminal record and they won’t let us through. So I ruined the tour for my band. And before we scheduled another tour, I needed to figure out how to get that off my record. So I hired a criminal lawyer who went to a judge and begged them what could we do to get this off this kid’s record? All he does is music and he can’t cross the border to, you know, tour, so we need to help this guy out and get this off his record. So, he’s like do 50 hours of community service and we’ll call it even. So I chose to read to the blind and at the center, Alice was the only other young person there. Everyone else was like pensioned or waiting to die, just killing time. So we were the only young people there and we started talking, and we learned that we both love the same obscure noise punk bands. Really weird, you know, we were both huge fans of Aids Wolf and Sick Lipstick. So we bonded over music, and she told me that she had her own noise punk band, to go check them out, and I did and I fell in love with her lyrics. I just loved everything that she was saying. She would never say a cliché, every sentence is original to her, you know? So I felt like I discovered a poet, and I started wanting to do something else, I didn’t want to do a heavy metal band anymore and I thought that she’d be the perfect person to start this with.
Are you and Alice a couple?
No, we’re like brother and sister. She’s like my baby sister.
How old are you?
I’m 29 she’s 20. We started this band when she was 15 and I was 24. Which is funny because she was in trouble with the law that early on.
What did she do?
I won’t tell mine, but she’s open about hers. She and her friends found this house where these people went on vacation for months, and they broke in and were living in it. The neighbors heard noise and they would party all the time and the house was supposed to be empty. So they got arrested for breaking in. It was the same exact deal, to get that off her record she had to do community service. So she was “squatting,” that’s the word.
Do you create instruments?
There’s this thing called circuit bending that I fooled around with a few years ago which means that you open up instruments and find the sound chip and you just figure out how to probe at it to make it do things that it’s not supposed to do. So, I did that for 48 hours once and recorded the entire session so that I could just sample from it. And, yeah, I still use those sounds.
And you guys are named after She-Ra right?
Yeah, we’re named after a commercial for the castle in She-Ra but we’ve never watched She-Ra.
And you guys didn’t know about the Atari game when you named yourselves?
No. It’s just a coincidence. There are like thousands of Atari games, I’m sure there are lots of band names.
If I find a band that’s kind of on their small level and then they get really popular I’m happy and I’m also kind of disappointed. How do you guys feel about blowing up so big lately?
I don’t feel like we’ve blown up, that’s just perception. I feel like we’ve been touring for two years just traveling from show to show so I don’t get to see whatever you’ve seen.
Do you guys have a certain target audience in mind?
No, just each other. We didn’t plan on having an audience at all. We thought that no one would ever listen to us.
I read that you guys were an accident.
No we weren’t an accident. We wanted to have a band but we thought there’d be like 20 people at every show. The accident thing is the song “Alice Practice” was recorded without us knowing it. We were sound checking and someone had been recording us, and then they gave us the recording later saying hey I recorded you guys testing the mics. So we turned that into “Alice Practice” but it was recorded by accident, but we weren’t an accident. A journalist took our accident song story and turned it into an accident band story, which is kind of annoying since we had a purpose.
What are the lyrics to “Crimewave”?
We don’t like telling people, we like people to guess what it is.
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