Crystal Castles Listen Up

10/23/08 10:25am

by Phil Villeneuve (CHARTattack)

Making New Kinds Of Noise

If you've ever wondered what electronic music sounds like when it's ripped to shreds, put back together and sprinkled with screaming, you're in luck. Toronto's Crystal Castles reinvented electronic music for the underground noise scene by taking the odd approach of breaking instruments and using the new, irritating noises they produced to create dark dance music.

If you think this is odd, you haven't heard about the duo's origins.

"We were both in trouble for bad behaviour and we had to do community service work to get the trouble wiped from our records," says main brain Ethan Kath, on how he and vocalist/screamer Alice Glass first met. "We both decided to read to the blind, and that's where we met.

"We were the only young people there, so we started talking about music and discovered that we loved the same bands in the underground noise scene, like Aids Wolf. I said that we should start a band together where we do that kind of thing, but replace the obnoxious guitars with broken electronic instruments."

Kath and Glass have been touring the globe as of late and have made big impressions with their riot-inducing shows and remixing. Their noisy self-titled debut will be released in March.

The following Listen Up article is from the March 2008 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, head on over to the Chart Shop.