Crystal Fighters
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Crystal Fighters

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They’d happily perform alongside experimental acts Crystal Castles and Crystal Stilts at a festival but Spanish influenced Crystal Fighters have their own set of rules. Delivering raved up, percussive folktronica with eccentric Basque instrumentation. We had a guy in the full Basque giant [outfit]… it was quite bizarre, he was just standing in the front row,” Sebastian Pringle says down the line from London in a beautifully thick English accent, talking of a fan at one of their recent gigs. “It’s good, it fills me with inspiration,” he adds, chuckling. Not dissimilar to the appearance of a scarecrow figure, the Basque outfit Pringle refers to is colourfully showcased on the album cover of the band’s debut album Star Of Love. The traditional Basque garments originate from Basque country; regions in the western Pyrenees that span the border between Spain and France. And this is where Crystal Fighters’ found the inspiration for Star Of Love.

Pringle and fellow UK friend Graham Dickson (guitar/txalaparta) met American Gilbert Vierich (electronics/percussion/guitar/txalaparta) in the summer of 2007 and Gilbert introduced the English lads to his Spanish/French friend Laure Stockley, one of the band’s occasional vocalists. Stockley showed the crew a half-finished manuscript for an opera left behind by her grandfather which she came across while clearing out the reclusive old man’s home in Basque countryside. The manuscript fuelled an interest in Spanish and Basque music for the group but, upon listening to the chaotic, electronic gamut of exotic dance music fused with a modern UK bass sound and punkish mayhem, it’s easy to see Basque music wasn’t the group’s only source of inspiration. “Not particularly in Basque,” Pringle replies when asked if the band was specifically interested in Basque music ahead of the album’s creation. “It was more into European music and European styles – older traditions of folk music, folk-dance music – but then transferred across to the Basque thing… it was really interesting for us and all these little things and ideas and languages and interest in languages came to bear on the project and made it as the album is.”

Recording the album very much on their own, Pringle says there was a lot of experimentation which came to bare on the record. “Much of it was done on our own really with little experience of making a proper record before,” he says. “We’ve not really done that and we did it all kind of ourselves so there was a lot of trial and error and a lot of experimentation, much of which we’ve learnt different ways of doing and things like that. So [it’s] a completely different sounding album but it’ll definitely take in all those [experimental] influences and more.

He goes on to say that attention to detail during the creation of an album is extremely important as an artist, something he and the rest of the band learnt very quickly. “[Being] sure about the type of thing – what you want to achieve at the beginning or trying to set a vision for tracks before you do them,” he says of specific learning curves during the album’s production process. “It sort of saves you a lot of time, to envisage things beforehand and try and create them. And any mistakes you make sort of become interesting in their own right. “

Always on the road, Pringle says the band is always up for the inclusion of new instruments and sounds in their work. “[We’re] travelling around so constantly picking up strange bits of percussion and different stringed instruments,” he says. “I’m really a guitarist and any sort of stringed thing will tickle my fancy. I think for us, it was all about writing good songs and trying to find interesting ways of making them sound ultimately songs of the core of the thing and that’s really your style that sets it apart. “

Crystal Fighters had been playing live shows a lot before completing the album and many of the songs on the record were formed from their live show. “We had a couple of fully finished tracks but the rest of it was like a big kind of chaotic mess of ideas which then separated out into different songs and I think the live shows retain some of that fluidity about it but with the recognisable album songs as the main parts of it,” Pringle describes. “It’s a different experience definitely as a live show than on the album – hopefully enjoyable both ways.”

The band have dropped the theatrical masks they once donned in their early live show but their live show still retains its rapturous and edgy reputation. “Now maybe it’s taken on a more shamanistic look but it’s similar in the amount of passion and theatre we give our performance but we’ve kind of dropped the narrative thing because we didn’t quite want to make people sit through a story-line narrated by bits of plastic,” he laughs. “We’ve concentrated on the music and song side and made that the drama of the situation rather than us prancing around.” Prancing or not, Pringle says they’re looking forward to making their Australian debut performance at Parklife and fans can expect their live show to be “a more stooped up version of the energy fest that it is at the moment!”

Crystal Fighters play Parklife alongside Diplo [USA], Katy B [UK], Sebastien Tellier [FRA] and more on Saturday September 24 at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

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