Canada’s Purity Ring are stalwarts of the electronic music sphere, having churned out incredible album after incredible album. A huge part of the delivery of their music is a huge focus on visuals, especially in a live setting. On their Land Voyage 2022 tour, we got to see Megan and Corin, and speak with them about new music, their live show, and the continuous challenges of the pandemic.
You’ve always put a lot of effort into your stage design and performance art; what thought goes into your stage design, and what inspires you to make it the way you do? How much time goes into planning it?
Corin: From the beginning, the fact that we’re just two people making music that’s electronic, we wanted to find a way to translate that to a live show that would make it a more visceral experience rather than just a laptop or a tiny little keyboard or something. We wanted something that would make people be able to visually experience the music the way that they feel it. So we’ve tried to do that from day one.
I think, though, that a show I saw that made inspired me to want to do something like that was back in, like, 2008 roughly, like, back way before Purity Ring started, I saw Fever Ray play a show at Pop Montréal, and it was the first time that I had seen a show that incorporated unique visuals that made it feel like it was really coming from the music. Like, they had these lamps that were pulsing with the beat. Seeing that made me think “whoa, this is what a visual show could be like” and that got it going in my mind of how to go in that direction.
Megan: At this point, the show is an evolution of the initial feeling. We need to have some visual aspect because we’re not playing an instrument. I think that comes from this thought back in 2010, electronic music wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is now, there was this train of thought like, “We aren’t playing any instruments; what are we gonna do, like, we have to fill this void?” And I’m not sure I can feel a void now, but this visual evolution has become the most important thing, being a visual aspect that people feel and have a sensory experience with. We want them to see, touch, hear, feel it, because ultimately the music that we make and the effort we put into an album is about the same thing.
C: Even our very first show that we played back in 2011 to now, it’s almost the same show, just on a much bigger scale. Like at our very first show we had a bunch of pipes that we got from Home Depot that we glued together, and we put lights in them, and we wrapped them around us in a way to make it feel like we were in a living room, and now it’s like, as stages have gotten bigger, we’ve tried to have that same feeling but just grow it.
M: Being in a living room is a very important feeling for me, like, I want everyone to feel like they are being hosted.
How much time goes into planning it?
C: As much time as we can possibly get. This time, I think due to the pandemic and due to the tour getting rescheduled multiple times, it actually gave us a benefit in giving us extra time to plan things out. Usually, past tours come together in two to three months of preparation. One month of brainstorming and coming up with ideas, then two months of trying them out and seeing what is possible.
M: This one we had, like, a year.
C: Yeah, we did a bunch of it, and then tour got canceled, and we had more time so we just kept working on the show and working on the show, and now I think this is the most refined show we’ve ever had. But also, each show, a lot of the elements are built off of shows that we’ve done on previous tours, so we’re not always starting from a blank slate, sometimes we’re building what we’ve done before and changing the visuals.
If you had no budget in mind, what would your dream tour visual set up be?
M: It’s so easy to just spend money on lights. Like, renting lights, and it doesn’t always pay off. Like sometimes it’s like “oh, we’ve got this budget, we’ll get more lights” but I don’t feel like if we had no budget we would probably do something we’ve wanted to do for years—well, Corrin especially has wanted to do for years—where we do an art installation so people can have a gallery experience of the record. People can go through it and experience it that way.
C: Something where each song is an experience that you actually get to live inside of and go through, but I don’t really know how that would really be a live show rather than a traveling listening experience.
M: This show we hired more artists to be involved, like this time, we worked with Brett Bolton who did the visuals, but Corin usually programs the lights through Ableton, so that it’s all synced and reactive. It’s so hard to imagine how we’d spend a lot of money because we had a time where we hired someone else to do our live show, and it went so badly, and we were like, “OK, we can not hire other artists to do the thing with our art that we are gonna tour on.” We can’t trust them because it feels in-genuine, but it also feels like it isn’t the best. We have this world, and there are parts of it that are impossible to communicate to someone else, so having a big budget just means more work for us.
C: I feel like if you have an unlimited budget, then you’ll actually just end up with a ridiculous, cheesy arena show or something. And we’ve learned that sometimes when you hire someone whose job it is to come up with good ideas, sometimes their good ideas have already been used.
How many people are in your touring crew on average?
M: I like the number seven, but we always end up with nine or so. But I guess not including us, that is seven. Corin, is it seven or six?
C: I think six because we don’t have a merch person this time.
M: And we lost one to COVID.
What has been in your tour listening rotation lately?
M: I’ve been really into the new D.C. Fontaines record. And the “choice selections” playlist is mostly what Corin is listening to. Some of what I’m listening to, but mostly Corin.
C: Yeah, mostly the pre-show playlist. I usually listen to a lot of music on tour, but on this tour I haven’t because we’re doing this thing in VIP where we do a meet and greet, and I give them a USB stick with a uniquely generated song on it. But the process of doing that is a lot more time consuming than I anticipated, so most of my downtime with headphones is doing those and getting them sorted, so I’ve heard, like, hundreds of variations of the same song of ours unfortunately.
That’s a really cool idea; what brought the idea of the generated song about?
C: The idea I had before we had the idea to give it to people in VIP was to create an infinite song. You would press play, and then it would go on forever using loops that change a little bit every time they loop and having them line up with other loops of different lengths so there are millions of different combinations. I didn’t really know what to do with it, so when we were planning the tour, and we were thinking of ways to thank people kind enough to get a VIP ticket, we thought, like, “Oh, that might be a good idea” to give everyone a three-to-six-minute chunk of this infinite song, and everyone gets their own, but it’s not an NFT it’s just a WAV file, haha.
I know you did a remix of it and play a cover of it on tour, is “Knife Prty” your favorite Deftones song? If not, what is?
C: “Knife Prty” is my favorite Deftones song, yeah. They asked us to do a remix for the White Pony 20th Anniversary, and we got to choose a song we wanted, and that was my first choice.
M: I love “Knife Prty,” and I am so glad we did it. It was a remix, but we wanted to make sure we could do it live, so we attempted to cross the bridge between remix and cover and we did it.
C: What’s funny is that years and years ago, I wanted to cover that song. Like five or eight years ago, I was thinking about doing a cover but it’s cool that this happened, and we got to do a remix that became a cover was like, “Wow, this really worked out.”
What’s your favorite song to play live?
M: We get this question a lot actually, and it changes. Mine lately has been “rubyinsides,” which surprises me. Every time I really enjoy playing it I am always like “whoa, what just happened?” It just feels like drifting through currents in a body of water.
C: I just like playing any of the newer songs that we haven’t played on previous tour. It’s fun for me because I’m finding new little things to add in. Some songs on this tour we’ve been playing for over 10 years now, and then other ones I’m like, “What will it sound like if I try this? Oh, not so good,” and then I don’t do it again, but sometimes something sounds surprisingly good, and it gets added to the rotation, and I do that for the next few shows. Songs like “pink lightning” and “stardew” are really fun for me.
M: “Graves” has been really fun, too.
I was actually a little surprised you didn’t play more from Graves; is that because this was supposed to be the WOMB specific tour?
M: Part of that is because we prepared this set back in September, and a lot of the songs on Graves did not exist yet. It’s also a pretty big deal to add a song to the set. We can take them away easily but to add one it takes Corin a full day to add a song.
C: It’s more than just getting the audio figured out; it’s having to figure out the visuals and making sure they go together. I honestly also think we just didn’t want to overload the set with too many new songs.
M: And, the set’s long! Every night I’m on the verge of losing my voice because I’ve been singing for an hour and a half straight every night for two months, so I don’t want to add anymore.
Your lyrics are one of the most impactful things about your music, always teetering on uncomfortable and grotesque but never too graphic, what work goes into them? Is there a lot of folklore influence?
M: Yes, I love folklore, like, I definitely have a bookshelf of a bunch of different countries of the world’s folklore. But, for me, I think it’s more about fantasy and escaping than about any specific folklore. Maybe it’s a Purity Ring-specific folklore, but it’s not necessarily inspired by the Brothers Grimm or Norwegian folklore or any of my favorites.
I find those stories inspiring but I have never found them to be the foundation for a song, it’s more so that I have an experience or a feeling, and I try to make that into a place that I would like to exist or have it exist. I want to build a world around an experience that I want to exist or have existed and that turns into my folklore. Also, the way you describe it, never too grotesque, it’s like writing a letter to someone, you don’t want to cross a line. I’m trying to direct my thinking in the way that I want to exist, so there’s always a sarcasm, a criticism, and a kindness, I guess. And some measure of fantasy, always.
On your bookshelf of folktales do you have a favorite?
M: Japanese folktales are really cool and very, very good. They’re unexpected, and in reading that folklore, there’s always a method, and they’re often similar stories. There’s also a graphic novel that is very short called One Hundred Nights Of Hero that I think about all the time. It’s not old, but it’s an old story, and someone made it into something newer. I think about it all the time, and it’s absolutely beautiful.
What are some of your favorite studio experimentations you’ve done? Are there any experiments you’ve wanted to do but haven’t done quite yet?
M: Yes, hahaha.
C: “Nothingsfine”—that one is really unique. We’ve never done something like that before. That is the only song we’ve ever done where everything happened in under an hour.
M: Yup. Well, might’ve been two, but yeah. Also, we didn’t plan to experiment or anything; it was like, “We gotta write a song!” and Corin went through what we had and if I can sing on it I will.
C: That one was more spontaneous than we normally are. Normally we’re structured, and we plan out the whole song like what is the chorus, what is the verse, and we arrange it so it makes sense. But this one was much more freeform, and messing around with stuff in real time while Megan was singing in the booth in real time.
M: That’s one of my favorite songs on the EP, and it’s because of how it happened. It felt like something that already existed, like it was something that we carved out of the studio walls.
C: There’s always more experimenting we want to do. I don’t know of anything specific, but it’s good to continually shake up the writing process so we don’t ever do the same thing twice. We’ve always talked about how it would be cool to work with a string section and have more acoustic elements and bring them into our world and bring more organically recorded material in, and that’s something we haven’t done yet that we may do sometime.
Now that you’ve done the work apart and together as far as writing goes, do you find that you usually have a preference for either?
M: It changes. Sometimes I’m like “Nope, I want to do this at home,” and sometimes it’s things that will take me hours or days to work on, and I don’t want to waste Corin’s time, so I’ll take it with me and work on it. But other times, things like “nothingsfine” happen or “Stranger Than Earth” was kind of like that too. It went fast when we were together but a lot of times we’ll have an idea and work on it. I think sometimes we need to work on things apart to make them grow.
C: Yeah, and I think we do a lot of preparation apart. Megan will bring in lyrics sometimes, or have lyrics for songs that don’t exist yet.
How has touring amidst covid been?
M: Good god. I still after this tour feel very strongly that it is not possible. It is wrong to tour right now. It’s not the artists’ faults, there should be mask mandates. There should be measures to make it safer for us to do our jobs. I feel this way about any artists, like we are in the entertainment industry, and touring is our best source of income and it’s like we’re fucking coalminers now. Nobody gives a fuck; most of our fans don’t give a fuck if we get Long COVID or chronic illness or whatever the facts of this pandemic are. The responsibility is on us ,and every night I am freaking out about whether or not my mask is sealed, and sometimes I have to close my eyes and go somewhere else and do what I need to do, but I’m terrified, and that’s not right.
I know that not everyone is, though. Some have been able to just put it away and not worry about it, or they don’t care if they get COVID, but I care very much, and I think that somebody should care more about us and somebody should make some fucking rules. I think in the next couple years there will be a LOT of musicians and entertainers who are not OK because they have Long COVID because a LOT of people have it, and I’m worried about that, and I’m frustrated that no one is thinking about that because that’s us.
I feel very lucky that we’ve made it this far, but it’s not luck. We have spent SO much money on COVID safety. I don’t really want to know the final number, but I know it’s fucking high, but I feel really good about that. I feel good about it because I know it’s the reason we’ve gotten this far.
One of the reasons we’ve gotten this far and one of the most expensive things is buying masks for every person at every show, which often, they don’t even wear. Some fans see a Purity Ring branded mask and are like, “Aw yeah, I’m gonna put that in my pocket,” but some fans are SO excited about advocating for mask-wearing. Not many bands are doing it, but it feels kind when bands are like “Let’s wear a mask; let’s take care of each other,” and I want that.
At the beginning of tour, there were a lot of shows where there was a bigger percentage of people masked. Sometimes people come to us and they say, “Your music is so meaningful to me in this way,” or, “Your music saved my life in this way,” y’know, like what music does for people, and it’s so sweet but seeing people in the crowd singing along with masks on and so excited to be at a show and support in this very specific way; I feel cared for by them in what I think is the same way they feel supported by our music and that’s really meaningful and I wish everyone who listened to our music felt like doing that for us and had the willingness to care for us by wearing a mask. But they don’t, and they don’t have to, and I think they should have to so that entertainers can fucking survive this because I don’t think many are and will, like I think about Justin Bieber’s face a lot, and it’s fucked and it’s so crazy.
It’s hard, and it’s kind of impossible, but we’re lucky.
—
Photo courtesy of Carson Davis Brown
You can keep up with Purity Ring, and check out their newest releases Graves and WOMB here.
