Sweet sounds of Purple Pilgrims
There’s more to Purple Pilgrims than two young women with long hair running around in the trees, making music that shimmers and floats, writes Grant Smithies. There are dark undertones and a lot of thought in sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon’s creat
Sisters making it for themselves
This is where the magic happens: a tiny hut in the Coromandel where sun pours in and sound leaks out. Paper lanterns line the bush track in, strung between five-finger, punga, coprosma and nikau. Shell necklaces dangle from the skeleton of an old greenhouse. An empty chair overlooks the river, surrounded by young willows and flax, and you’d give anything to be sitting there yourself on a scorching summer’s day, feeling the cool breeze rising off the water. Inside the hut, rocks and crystals cluster on a shelf lined with little pom-poms. There are jars of incense sticks and lacquered chopsticks. Bundles of dried herbs hang from the rafters. A frame containing 12 exotic butterflies leans against a window looking out on to a world of green. On the bookshelf, alongside Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and a guidebook to Greece, there’s a well-worn book called Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Electric Eden. Perhaps that’s what sisters Clementine and Valentine Nixon have created for themselves, right here in Aotearoa, in this backyard studio on family land. ‘‘We moved back to New Zealand a few years ago,’’ says Valentine, who’s thoughtful, articulate and lovely company, despite me calling early and her being ‘‘not a morning person’’. ‘‘We had never been to Coromandel before, but our parents bought this property with a few old falling-down structures in the garden. We claimed a sleepout for our studio and it was perfect, because just before that we’d been in Hong Kong, living in a high-rise with no green around.’’ The sisters record together as Purple Pilgrims, a name that implies rich colour and restless travelling. How apt. Creative children of adventurous parents, the sisters have been sporadic nomads since childhood, moving from Christchurch to Hong Kong and back again, with all manner of places in between. The duo’s generously trippy second album, Perfumed Earth, was released on Flying Nun in August last year, and many ears perked up. The sisters have spent much of the past six months on the road, unleashing a sophisticated dream-folk sound on delighted global audiences that grow with every tour. In fact, they’re travelling right now. When I talk to Valentine, the sisters have just got back from a short residency at a New York venue, and are flying to Belgium a few days later to kick off a 24-date European tour. After that, they come home to play support for Aldous Harding’s New Zealand tour this month, then head to Texas for the South by Southwest festival, followed by dates in the United Kingdom and a run of winter shows in Scandinavia. In between, they’re here, writing and recording in this remote hut in the Coromandel. You can see the place for yourself online, in a 2016 video filmed for RNZ Music, when they give a live performance of an early song called Thru Evry Cell, which perfectly sketches out the bones of their current sound. A drum machine patters and ticks in the corner. Clementine plays a cherry-red Gibson through an effects pedal set to ‘‘lush’’. The sound is so airy, she might be playing on a drifting cloud. Meanwhile, Valentine coaxes fuzzy chords from a tiny electric keyboard the colour of a tomato that’s not quite ripe. Their voices braid together, clear and high and beautiful. In another video made the same year, the sisters can be found tearing around the same garden at night, biting magnolia blossoms, circling a drum of burning wood, swirling through the dark trees in a wavering circle of light, as if some pagan ritual is being enacted over tweaked-out psychedelic guitar and chilly synths. It’s spooky. One YouTube commenter describes the sound as ‘‘exquisite neohippyism’’, while another notes ‘‘the ’shroomy power is strong in this one’’. Purple Pilgrims’ sound has become more detailed and complex with time, but the feeling remains of music made slowly and with great care amid trees. ‘‘It was [a] huge culture shock coming here at first,’’ admits Valentine. ‘‘Here in Tapu, there’s no cellphone coverage. The solitude you long for when you’re living in an urban metropolis hits you really hard when you finally get it. In a huge city, you’re surrounded by white noise and, when you move, its absence hits you quite hard. Here, the white noise is mostly cicadas.’’ Rather than millions of people swarming through concrete canyons below, they are now surrounded by birds. The light is dappled through leaves, rather than smudged through smog.
If they need to perk themselves up while recording a track, they just step outside to go for a swim. ‘‘It’s luxurious to have the time to ponder what you’re making, and the lack of big-city distractions makes the whole process quite mellow, which suits our personalities well.’’ The sisters were born in Christchurch, and moved to Hong Kong when they were aged 5 and 8. ‘‘We were really little when our family started travelling. We were home-schooled, so it was often just the two of us in our own world, while the people and places around us changed.’’ They ended up back in Christchurch, where Valentine got heavily into singing folk music and Clementine went to art school. ‘‘She got into noise music, that whole sonic art world,’’ says Valentine. ‘‘And then, somewhere along the line, our interests met in the middle. We taught ourselves production skills so we could record our own music, though we’re still an art project as much as a musical one. The visual aesthetic of what we do is almost as important as the sound.’’ Purple Pilgrims played their first show in Christchurch in 2011, not long before the devastating February earthquake flattened the family home. They left the shattered city soon after, making their home on the 26th floor of a Hong Kong apartment building and played live within the city’s ‘‘intense’’ music scene from 2012. ‘‘We used to do tape collages from field recordings and played in a lot of galleries and [in] old, abandoned industrial buildings. Our shows were hard to find, in these subterranean places, because a lot of these events are illegal and there’s no signage. You have to follow other people towards the noise and light and smoke. It was very exciting,’’ Valentine says. She recalls ‘‘a real sense of weight and urgency’’ to the music and art scenes over there. ‘‘People believe so deeply in what they’re doing, which we both found very inspiring. The music scene in Hong Kong is fascinating, because it goes so much against the wider society’s values. To throw yourself into the arts takes real guts over there, because societal pressures are so strong to conform to your family’s expectations. There’s huge pressure to succeed at some sort of day job, because the net to catch you doesn’t really exist.’’ Around this time, Purple Pilgrims were invited to tour the United States and Europe with American cult hero, Ariel Pink. ‘‘We had recorded a song before we left Christchurch that was picked up by some overseas blogs, and that tour sprang out of that. But we were playing full-on noise music back then. The sound was very different from what we’re doing now.’’ Do they still, in the privacy of their studio in the bush, occasionally feel the urge to bash out hurtful waves of guitar feedback? Do they terrify the tu¯¯ı? Are the local bellbirds suffering from PTSD? ‘‘Yeah, actually, we do! We still like making that music, but our records have headed off somewhere else, now.’’ Indeed. This latest album has a peaceful, stately, sometimes slightly sinister vibe, with many lyrics influenced by mythology and folklore. You can hear connections back to the shimmering gothy electro-pop associated with the UK’s 4AD label during the 1980s, which has led to Purple Pilgrims often being framed as Aotearoa’s answer to haze-pop pioneers Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins. But under all the guitar effects and diaphanous synthesisers, I hear older ghosts rising up through these songs. The purity of the Nixon sisters’ voices, the cycling melodic lines, the repeated references to nature, myth and ritual, and the persistent hallucinogenic vibe, also hark back to early 1970s folk singers such as Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs. Perfumed Earth could almost be an indie update of Perhacs’ 1970 psych-folk classic Parallelograms. ‘‘Aaah! Yes! That is an amazing record, I think. I’m so pleased you hear that in there. We did listen to Cocteau Twins, but a lot of the bands people compare us to aren’t really on our radar at all,’’ Valentine says. I wonder if some reviewers fixate on the surface prettiness of these songs and miss the turbulence beneath. You can see why. At first, you’re struck by the voices and the wispy drift of this music, but turn it up loud and you’ll find all sorts of darker details. The grittier aspects of the duo’s aesthetic are plain to see in their most recent videos, too. The clip for the frankly gorgeous Sensing Me finds them in black cloaks, hoods and smudged makeup, weeping tears of blood against red velvet, the backdrop resembling a puppet show from a David Lynch movie. And lead single Two Worlds Apart is a marvel. The song itself hovers and haunts. The video involves cheap hotel rooms, a stolen car with a flower-wreathed body in the boot, and some swirly dancing on the banks of the Waikato River near Huntly Power Station. ‘‘Yes, well, I think some contrasting darkness can make a beautiful thing more beautiful. We’re not interested so much in this music just being pretty.’’ The album also has an intimacy to it that almost makes you feel as if you’re eavesdropping. Something is going on within a very specific private world these two have created for themselves, and you’re outside the hut, listening. ‘‘I really like that idea. The record is insular, in a way, and the isolation of the place we made this music has accentuated that. There’s this sense of Clementine and I doing something together in a remote place that’s very distant from our old life, surrounded by nature.’’ Two young women with long hair, running around in the trees, making music that shimmers and floats. I imagine some superficial aspects of Purple Pilgrims’ look and sound have led to them being unfairly patronised in some quarters. Do Valentine and Clementine have to deal with some people (and I’m thinking this would be mainly middle-aged men), assuming they’re just a pair of photogenic goth hippies? ‘‘Oh, yes! Yeah, we do. Some people entirely miss the darkness in this music. Some reviewers hear our vocal delivery and just write stuff about angels or whatever.’’ She laughs at this, and I do too, because this music is more witch than angel, more occult than cute. Folk music, the ancient wellspring for the current Purple Pilgrims sound, has never been just celestial ear-candy for wimps. There’s a long tradition in folk music of women with pure voices singing about very dark things. The voice might float high and free, but the tale it tells is of a murdered lover, failed crops, family feuds, an illegitimate baby being cast into a well. ‘‘Yes, exactly. There are often dangerous currents swirling below the pretty surface of things, right? In our case, that’s entirely intentional, and it’s good when people listen closely enough to figure that out.’’
The Purple Pilgrims will join Aldous Harding and Weyes Blood for concerts at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre (March 13, as part of the NZ Festival), the Auckland Town Hall (March 14, as part of the Auckland Arts Festival), and the Christchurch Town Hall (March 15).