Crystal Castles is a Toronto-formed band, consisting of multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass.^[7] Crystal Castles are known not only for their own efforts as a band, but also for their chaotic live shows and Kath’s remixes for a number of groups, including “Hunting for Witches” by Bloc Party, and “Atlantis to Interzone” by friends, Klaxons.^[8]

History

Crystal Castles, named after the Crystal Castle from She-Ra: Princess of Power, formed in December 2003 as a project started by Ethan Kath. In April 2005, Alice Glass recorded vocals for five original instrumentals by Kath. The band’s first single was recorded “accidentally”: a microphone test by Glass was released through MySpace as “Alice Practice” in September 2005. Glass was not aware that it had been used until record companies heard the song and contacted the duo to offer them record deals.^[9]

Since the release of “Alice Practice”, the duo announced plans to release their first full-length album on Last Gang Records, which was released in North America on 18 March 2008 and released in the UK on 28 April 2008.^[10]

Touring

Crystal Castles have toured Europe and the USA numerous times since 2006, including a US tour with Australian, electronic group, The Presets in February 2007.^[11][12][13] The band also played at the Reading and Leeds Festivals in England, August 2007^[14] and were set to play the CMJ Festival October 2007.^{[15][16][17][18]} They supported Metric on certain dates throughout their North American tour in September and October 2007^[19][20][21] and also headlined Vice Magazine’s UK tour in November 2007 called Unitaur, which also featured These New Puritans, and The Teenagers.^[22]

In May 2008, Crystal Castles headlined the UK’s NME New Noise tour along with Friendly Fires, Team Waterpolo and White Lies.

Crystal Castles performed at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2008, where the on-stage antics of Glass which included her climbing the stage rigging and constantly stage-diving, led to the organisers curtailing their set.^[23] Crystal Castles toured with Nine Inch Nails in dates across July and August 2008.^[24] Crystal Castles are also set to play various European summer festivals including England’s Reading & Leeds Festivals. Then were expected to return to the UK in September 2008 for a headlining tour but had to cancel due to recording commitments. Instead they will play a handful of dates as a warm-up for their festival dates. In October they will be playing at the Iceland Airwaves festival. Their current live drummer is Michael Bell of Lymbyc Systym.

Copyright disputes

In mid-2008, Crystal Castles were involved in 2 controversies related to artwork permissions and samples in their earliest unreleased songs. Pitchfork Media and The Torontoist published stories about Crystal Castles’ use of Trevor Brown’s artwork without permission. The image, depicting a black-eyed Madonna,^[25][8] was used by the band on merchandise. The issue was resolved after the band bought the rights to use the image from Brown. ^[26] One such track, “Insecticon”, uses chopped up samples from a song by Lo-bat called, “My Little Droid Needs a Hand” (released under a Creative Commons license),^[27]. Another includes the song “Love and Caring”, which samples the kick and snare from Covox’s “Sunday”.^{[28][29][30][31]} Pitchfork published an article in defense of the band, saying that the band had never released the songs nor performed them and thus were not responsible for breaking the Creative Commons licensing on the songs.^[24]

Musical style

Crystal Castles’ music is easily recognized by their heavy use of samples and distorted female vocals. Crystal Castles claims to use a modified keyboard that uses an Atari 5200 sound chip ^[7] as an oscillator. Their musical style has been described as having “ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches and bruising drum bombast pierce [the] skull with sheer shrill force, burrowing deep into the brain like a fever”.^[32] Indie music review website, Pitchfork, gave a positive review of Crystal Castles’ remix of “Leni” by GoodBooks, and described the style as “pitch-shifted vocal snippets [that] ricochet like pinballs around Crystal Castles’ patented 8-bit synths”.^[33]

Band Members

• Ethan Kath - Instruments / Production
• Alice Glass - Vocals

Videography

• Air War (2006) (Banned video)
• Crimewave (2007) (Banned video)
• Magic Spells (2008) (Directed by Videomarsh, who created the special effects of a cinder block smashing someone’s skull)
• Courtship Dating (2008) (Directed by Marc Pannozzo)
• Crimewave (2008) (Fan video released as the official video including live footage and clips from the Bruce LaBruce film “Otto”)

Discography

Studio albums

• Crystal Castles (March 18, 2008) - Lies Records / Last Gang Records (UK #47)

Singles and EPs

• Alice Practice 7″ EP (June 01, 2006) - Merok Records (ME002)

• Limited edition of 500 copies. Sold out in three days.

• “Crimewave” 7″ (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH) (August 13, 2007) - Trouble Records
• “Air War” 7″ (December 17, 2007) - Trouble Records (TROUBLE001)
• “Courtship Dating” 7″ (March 31, 2008)
• “Crimewave” 12″ (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH) (September 2008)

Bootlegs

• Live at Glastonbury 2008 EP (2008)

Remixes

Ethan Kath, under the name Crystal Castles, has remixed a number of songs including:

• “Crimewave” by HEALTH
• “Atlantis to Interzone” by Klaxons
• “Lovers Who Uncover” by The Little Ones
• “Leni” by GoodBooks
• “Pop the Glock” by Uffie, called “Make It Hott”.
• “Trash The Rental” by Sohodolls
• “It Fit When I Was A Kid” by Liars
• “Divebomb” by The Whip
• “Hunting for Witches” by Bloc Party
• “Death” by White Lies

NOTE: The aforementioned content was based on the Crystal Casltles Wikipedia article, which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Castles_(band)