A
gig
held at Crofters Rights
on Wednesday 15th January. The event starts at 19:30.
We are delighted to be welcoming the kiwi lucid-dream sisters Purple Pilgrims, now signed with Flying Nun Records, touring the first time Europe with one of our now classic freebies at The Crofters Rights. Support comes from the blue velvety Bristol duo Robbie & Mona!
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 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 night swimming 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.