Art by Evan Solano
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The fact that someone is always watching SORCERER on Letterboxd gives Will Schube faith in humanity.
If you’ve ever felt an insatiable desire to take in a set at a jazz club suffocating in cigarette smoke while simultaneously listening to a Four Tet mix in your bathtub, I’d like to introduce you to Crystal Sting. The duo of Kurtis Perrie and Bjorn Kriel, nascent figures in Toronto’s scrappy underground DIY scene, make experimental electronic music that is equal parts heady, playful, and deeply philosophical, like if Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians were a Tim Hecker DJ set. Throughout their debut, Bubblegum Aquarium, there are moments of delirious pop joy (the El Guincho-inspired steel drums on “Splash Party”), buzzy and brainy ambient activations (“Suburban Atomizer”), and intelligent spins on hedonistic dancefloor bangers (“HD Umbrella”).
Perrie and Kriel both grew up in the town of Kelowna, British Columbia. The lone experience they remember having in Kelowna was bonding over Destroyer’s Kaputt as teenagers at a local record shop. It wasn’t until years later that their musical lives took shape as they both moved to Toronto: Kriel departed for the CN Tower in 2017 to study jazz piano performance at the University of Toronto while Perrie followed a few years later. As Kriel was getting deep into the weeds of jazz theory, eventually growing obsessed with mallet percussion (the vibes in particular), Perrie worked at a studio, learning audio engineering and immersing himself in electronic hardware.
Their two different educations coalesced with Crystal Sting, and by 2023 the pair began to gel. “Kurtis started getting really into modular synth stuff around the time that I started getting really into mallet percussion,” Kriel says. “That was really when we started to discover something that was working live and also sounding cool that we were both really excited about.”
To explain how, exactly, Crystal Sting recorded Bubblegum Aquarium would take a masters degree I don’t have, but let’s give it a go: Bjorn plays melodies on the vibraphone, which Kurtis captures in live time and thanks to some nifty software, instantly sends them back to his bandmate to manipulate, also in live time.
“Bjorn’s playing different kinds of melodic instruments and then I’m recontextualizing them with my system and resynthesizing his playing, putting him in this world to improvise in, and do this, call back sort of thing,” Perrie explains.
Kriel hops in, though his explainer is also too heady for my pea brain: “It’s almost generative in a way. The sound starts when I make a sound and then it comes back to me in this new sonic world and it becomes this sort of infinite loop of existing in the world while also creating it at the same time.”
Literally, I do not know what either of them are talking about, but Bubblegum Aquarium undoubtedly feels like a brilliant album (out now on POW Records, of course), like Four Tet remixing Joel Ross or Darkside bringing a hologram Milt Jackson on the road.
Check out our conversation below, where we get deep into the Toronto jazz scene, aquatic vibes (the feeling, not the instrument), and the blend of playfulness and intellectual rigor at the core of their work.