A great double bill of shoegaze and experimentation at West Germany this February as part of the CTM Vorspiel programme with New Zealanders Purple Pilgrims playing a special live concert plus opening support from Fausto Maijstral.
Psychic sisterhood and wistful wanderlust are the twin energies feeding lush ceremonial dream-pop duo Purple Pilgrims – AKA multi-instrumentalist, home producers Valentine and Clementine Nixon. Raised itinerantly in Hong Kong and on New Zealand’s South Island, with deep backgrounds in folk music (their great-grandfather Davie Stewart was recorded by Alan Lomax), the sisters adapted by devising their own telepathic inner worlds. After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 leveled their home they migrated to the North Island, crashing with friends and sleeping in cars, eventually returning to China, where they began performing crouched sets of gauzy, angelic noise.
Subsequent tours of Europe and America alongside Yek Koo, Gary War and Ariel Pink helped hone their sprawling, choral haze into leaner, more mantric forms. To record their first full-length LP Eternal Delight, the Pilgrims sequestered themselves in Tapu, on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula of NZ, in a shed surrounded by native palms and birds. The isolation, stars, and river nightswimming evidently soaked into the music – all 10 tracks radiate spectral feeling and wide-eyed sensuality. In 2018 Purple Pilgrims collaborated with legendary Antipodean guitarist Roy Montgomery (The Pin Group) on his album Suffuse, alongside some of the era’s most compelling women singers (Grouper, Circuit des Yeux, Julianna Barwick), the sisters lending their voices and lyricism to his enveloping sound.
Fausto Maijstral is the duo of DuChamp (IT) and Will Gresson (NZ). Together they perform dense, musique concrete/drone pieces that explore memory and lived experience through heavily processed instruments and field recordings. Their first album, untitled, was released through La Station Radar in 2014, their latest work (2019) is the archive tape “The first five years plan” released through Econore record.
Purple Pilgrims and Fausto Maijstral LIVE
Sunday, 2nd February 2020 | Doors 20:30 CET | Starts 21:30 CET
Westgermany venue | Skalitzer Straße 133 | 10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg
purplepilgrims.net | Event @ Facebook
Photo by Olivia Renouf
