Interview: Crystal Castles

Alice may dominate the duo's live shows but, offstage, control freak Ethan is the paranoid king of Canada's Crystal Castles

Words Niall O'Keeffe

Photography Chris Owens



You don’t need to spend too long in Crystal Castles’ company to guess what kind of relationship exists between Alice Glass (18-year-old vocalist) and Ethan Fawn (27-year-old keyboardist/ programmer). With Crystal Castles, it’s all about the C word: control.

We meet the duo at Brixton Academy, where they’re supporting Klaxons. They show an hour before their stage-time and throughout a rushed photo shoot in the dressing room they’re surly and uncooperative. Or rather, Ethan is, and Ethan’s plainly running the Crystal Castles show.

When Pigeon photographer Chris suggests they lie on the floor to be shot from above, Ethan bluntly refuses. Moving to plan b, Chris asks them to pose against the wall, at which point Ethan decides to drape a black t-shirt over his face. Alice, meanwhile, pulls a mask over hers. Presumably they’re tired of being chased through the streets by screaming fans.

As the shoot wears on, Ethan grows increasingly tetchy. “She needs to eat!” he exclaims at one point – “she” being Alice, who’s right here in the dressing room and has vocal chords of her own. When Chris suggests that a good photo will encourage people to read the article, Ethan replies that he only does press because his record label forces him to. I start to look forward to the interview.

Matters descend into farce. Chris tries to get Ethan more involved; Ethan turns to face the wall. Chris asks Ethan to face Alice; Ethan pushes his tongue below his bottom lip in a gesture rarely seen outside primary schools. But the shoot’s most revealing moment arrives when Chris politely requests that Alice lift up the corner of her mask. “Don’t lift up the mask!” Ethan snaps.

“She can make her own decisions!” says Chris, and I barely resist applauding. But my spirits plunge when Ethan announces that he’ll be doing the interview alone.

Before I share with you Ethan’s uproarious anecdotes and twinkly asides, let’s do the back-story. Toronto’s Crystal Castles first entered a studio in April 2005, after Ethan saw Alice playing with noise band Fetus Fatale and invited her to sing over some instrumental tracks he’d been working on (in parallel with his garage metal band, Jakarta).

The pair went in to record five songs and came out with six, the studio engineer having surreptitiously recorded Alice while she tested her mic over a repetitive loop. Six months later, Ethan posted the songs on MySpace “to see what my friends thought”. When he checked the page a month later, there were deal offers from three labels.

East London-based Merok Records, an early home to Klaxons, won the race by offering to fly Crystal Castles to the UK to play some shows. The mic-test song, ‘Alice Practice’, was released as Crystal Castles’ first single in June 2006. Subsequently their profile was boosted by the show-stealing inclusion of ‘Air War’ on Alt Delete’s Digital Penetration compilation. They’ve since signed to Last Gang Records and in March they’ll release an eponymous debut album.

Though the album’s punctuated with ambient instrumentals, Crystal Castles specialise in trashy punk disco that makes effective use of Alice’s rasping screech of a voice. A host of new genres have been created in the band’s honour: 8-bit terror, minkwave, chipcore, punk-death-glitch. In the UK, they’ll inevitably be filed under Shoreditch electro. Their music’s short on intimacy and warmth, but exciting and danceable.

Following his Veruca Salt routine in the photo shoot, I tread carefully in conversation with Ethan, but it doesn’t quell his paranoia. He manages to go off the record four times in 20 minutes and insists that I switch off my dictaphone every time someone enters the room, as if I might gain a scoop by recording his dinner order or a conversation about stage times.

When I ask him about his name – he’s often referred to as Claudio, even by people who work with him – he replies, “I used to have different friends who did interviews for us and I told them to make up different names each time… So I keep hearing new names that make me laugh every time.”

He says this without cracking any kind of smile.

Talk turns to Alice. Do you know what her lyrics are about, Ethan? “One of the things I liked about her, when I saw her previous band… I noticed that everything she was saying was something that had never been said before. There were no obvious lyrics… she will never say something that has been said before.”

Does she give you completely free reign to manipulate and distort her vocals? “Yeah, once she records her voice, she trusts me.”

There’s a story that her old band are furious at her being poached away. “They still write her every week. ‘Hey, after this week, can we practise? We haven’t practised in a long time.’ It’s like, ‘Have you not noticed that she doesn’t have time any more?’ Every week she gets a message! It’s fucked up.”

There’s a short laugh at the end of this slightly cruel anecdote, but it’s only when he talks about Crystal Castles’ mixer Alex Dromgoole that Ethan becomes truly animated. “I’ve already fired three mixers because they weren’t doing it right, and then finally found the right guy: he’s gifted at mixing… the next thing he does is Madonna’s album. That’s how good he is.”

Ethan expresses shock at the enthusiasm that has greeted his band. Recalling early shows, he says, “When all my friends in bands play… really, nobody cares. They’re just there to drink. And I was expecting the same thing. But there were people waiting for us, and the second we’d start it would erupt into a big dance party.”

With stage time looming, the conversation abruptly dries up. A question about the future of Crystal Castles draws this: “We’ve never thought of the future, ever.”

It’s time for Ethan to be left alone with his Thai green curry.

Ten minutes later, Alice joins Ethan and their live drummer onstage and, instantaneously, she is transformed. The demure, acquiescent girl I met backstage is suddenly an all-singing, all-dancing punk rock monster. As she bounces about the stage, filling the Academy with her shrieks, Ethan applies all manner of effects, to the point where you’re unsure at times if it’s still her voice you’re hearing. Either way, the room is buzzing by the time ‘Air War’ pitches up.

The set comes to a sudden halt when Ethan flings his mic to the floor and storms off. And Alice? She clocks his departure and obediently follows after him.

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