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spotlight-studios
1st February 2013

Interview: Purity Ring

The Canadian duo speak to The Mancunion about creative control, witchcraft and making music miles apart
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With its brilliant combination of pop sensibilities, pitch shifted vocals and mysterious tone, Purity Ring’s debut album ‘Shrines’ is a masterpiece. It grabs the listener, drawing them into a journey through its shadowy catacombs and mysterious covens, and after its brief thirty-eight minute rub, it thrusts the startled listener back into daylight wanting more. After receiving a huge amount of critical acclaim, Megan James and Corin Roddick have taken the album on a mammoth international tour, spoke to The Mancunion ahead of their Manchester show at Sound Control.

They seemed to be enjoying the hectic schedule; “There’s a lot of places on this tour where we haven’t been before. We’ve been overseas once or twice but just short little bits and this time were doing a whole European and UK tour,” said James. “So it’s like the real deal!” With so many live dates, it seems a wonder that they haven’t felt overwhelmed by the whole experience, but Roddick explains that “we always have enough time, we have a month on and a month off, so it’s not too bad”.

Despite both hailing from Edmonton, James and Roddick now live away from each other, having a huge impact on the way that the tracks on the album were formed. Working on each piece separately, they would both develop their own parts and only really get together to record, as Roddick describes, ”the process would work like, I would write a track and send it to Megan and we’d send it back and forth while Megan is working on the vocals. Sometimes when we do that, we do a couple of tracks at a time, but most of the process is done apart.”

Much of the band’s lyricism is inspired by witchcraft and the human anatomy. This is one of the many things that sets them apart from many other musicians around at the moment, but the inspiration for these lyrics seems very hard to pin down. As James, the primary lyricist for the band, acknowledged: “I don’t know where it comes from. I’m obviously taken by a lot of those topics and that’s the reason I write about them, but I can’t say it’s from a particular book or artist. It’s just me.”

The band’s DIY approach is another notable feature of their work. During their live shows, Corin uses a custom-built, tree-like instrument to drive both sound and lighting, and they both wear custom clothes and jewellery designed by James. As she illuminates,  ”I think that’s naturally how we’re comfortable presenting music. We’ve been to a lot of shows ourselves and we’re conscious of how we want to present our own show, and that ties in with how we’ve always done them. And that is doing a lot of it ourselves, and making sure that we’re always in charge of what it looks like and what it is artistically. It’s really important for us.”

When asked what advice they could give to new acts, this point was stressed by Roddick. “Be careful. When people start becoming interested in the music you make, it’s pretty easy to have things taken away from you. It’s something you have to be pretty on top of if you want things to stay in your own realm.”

This devotion to all of the aspects to their performance certainly shines through, as evidenced by the new video to their song ‘Lofticries’, directed by A G Rojas. They seem to have enjoyed having another creative mind bringing their own take to the Purity Ring experience: “He did a really good job on it,” James says, “He didn’t take the song for what it necessarily was about, he just took what he felt from it and made what he wanted. It was really nice.”  It’s a rare lapse in control for a band who insist on remaining on top of all aspects of their work – it’s an approach that’s worked so far, bringing an eclectic band considerable acclaim and boding well for the future.

Purity Ring’s debut album ‘Shrines’ is out now on 4AD and Last Gang records, check out http://purityringsongs.com/ for more details.


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