Purity Ring are the Canadian duo of Corin Roddick and Megan James. Roddick takes care of the weightless, atmospheric beats and James weaves vocal melodies through the clouds of synthesizer haze. Or something like that. Blending hip-hop, classic pop and moody electronica, the duo made quite a buzzy name for themselves in blog circles over the past few years before getting signed up to major indie 4AD for the release of their debut album, Shrines.
This Thursday they play the Button Factory for their first non-festival show in Ireland. We’ve got a pair of tickets to give away and all you have to do to win is leave a comment down the bottom with a link to your favourite track from the 4AD back-catalogue. Make sure you fill in your email too and we’ll let you know on Thursday afternoon if you’ve won.
Anyway, Megan answered a couple of questions for us a while back.
TD: This is kind of your first real tour, are you excited?
MJ: We toured a little bit before but it was all sort of day event stuff and never for more than like a week. We’re driving around so I’m really excited to be driving and to see all the real stuff. I have a lot of family in the Netherlands so Amsterdam and the few places in the Netherlands that we’re playing. That’ll be nice. The last time we were in Dublin we played the Forbidden Fruit festival and went to an after-party at the Button Factory and I didn’t actually go in, I just went down to the basement. So I’m excited to go there, it seems like a pretty cool venue.
How have you found the transition from your recorded work to playing live? Have you had to work at it much?
That’s a pretty major focus for us. Aside from recording over the past couple of years, we find it really important to make sure our live show is more of a performance rather than just how we write and record. How we write is really strange and isolated so it’s hard to really portray that in a live setting which is why we had to figure out how to do it in a more interesting way or appealing way. If we didn’t do what we are doing or something like it, it would be Corin on a laptop and me singing and who wants to go that show more than once, or at all? It’s been really important for us to make it a performance and make it something that is a wonder to watch. Really like it’s all the things a performance should be or can be, full of wonder and a little bit of nostalgia and mystery, things that bring out what we feel the music is made out of.
How does the audience figure into what you do on stage?
Every show is a little bit different, solely because of the audience, the way they react to shows in general and your show in particular. It’s funny but it actually makes a huge difference if the crowd is moving very much, like whether they’re excited and they’re dancing and they’re throwing themselves around or they’re just standing still with their arms crossed. It seems like there’s a majority of people who will all do the same thing at every given show. Because of that you have to make sure that you are sure of what you’re doing and the way you’re doing it, so that the negative aspects of that don’t affect you. Also to be able to hold on to them. When an audience is giving off good vibes and making a show better, that can be what makes the best show you ever play. It’s also important to make sure that you don’t leave your perception of the show up to the crowd and that’s a lot of what our live show does. We didn’t plan it but it does actually. It over takes the stage and us so it’s easy to disregard what’s going on around you, even though it is to make people feel like they’re interacting with you.
Has this new interaction with an audience changed the way you write at all?
Writing is more about yourself, you know? Some people write for an audience, to please a particular target market. You get your full enjoyment and full satisfaction out of making it for self-gratification and a cathartic release of your emotions I think. We both do that and that’s what is so beautiful about being home and being able to create and appreciate things that way, through yourself, through your own creations.
Has it been difficult to hold on to that kind of intensely personal connection when you know so many people are listening to your music and experiencing it in so many different ways?
It’s been something that I’ve had to get used to and it’s taken a long time because I never expected what we made to turn into what it has. It is another aspect and twist on what you do create but it’s really important I think to keep in mind always why you’re doing and the purposes of what you’re creating. Make sure that you’re always doing it for the same reasons you were in the first place. It’s very different though, I never expected to be touring the way we do and to be selling records the way we are, it’s always a surprise to me. It’s like this is what’s working, this is what’s happening and I have to make sure I’m taking care of myself so I don’t go crazy and lose it!
I was thinking about the album title in relation to this, just as a record that kind of encapsulates something deeply personal for you. Something that you can come back to and have stand as a testament to who you both were at a given moment.
I never thought of it that way but there are many definitions to the word shrine and I think the title kind of encapsulates all of them, which is one of the reasons why we like it so much. There are a few words that are reoccurring through the entire album and shrine is one of them. That’s one of the reasons we picked it as well. It’s really just how we feel about what each of the songs are and all of them as a whole. It’s the best way to portray what we think it is, like for us it is a form of a shrine, in any sense of the word. And it’s our first album so it’s fairly dear to us, the way you could describe a shrine being and something we hope to be able to come back to and appreciate some time from now.
Finally, did you see the Hipster Runoff post you guys were in a while back? The one about the negative impact of online music news and stuff like that?
No, I didn’t see it, I should look. Is it good or bad? Mockery?
It’s not really bad. It just talks about how Pitchfork, blogs and the online content farms have created a sort of attention deficit disorder among music fans and how it has a negative impact on the artistic side of things.
That is like a scary element of being a part of the internet and that’s a lot of the reason I don’t really pay attention to a lot of it. That in itself is the reason I haven’t read the Hipster Runoff thing yet. I don’t purposely not read Hipster Runoff but I just don’t need to give my attention to all of those things. It’s true though because it does turn this beautiful thing that I have so much respect for into a machine. Not necessarily myself but music in general. At the same time, it’s so important and so useful to be successful and to get anywhere. It’s really hard to work without it but it can lead to something you don’t value at all. I guess there’s no way around that except to be aware of it. I’ll have to read that because I’m not totally certain we’re talking about the same thing!
You can find all the details of Thursday’s gig here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgKk8Eqyzkk?rel=0]
