Ancient Stories, Modern Sounds
Clementine and Valentine Nixon, aka Purple Pilgrims, are sisters who make music together. At times playful, ethereal or hauntingly enigmatic, their ever-evolving sound is hard to categorise but certainly falls into the alternative realm.
Music is in their blood. Not only are they sisters, but Clementine and Valentine come from a long line of Scottish folk musicians. Naturally, music was always around growing up.
“Our grandparents were always singing,” says Valentine. “Our grandfather taught Clementine the notes on the piano, and our grandmother would sing with us.
Our mum would sing with us. Scottish folk ballads were what I started with.
That had a real impact because essentially it’s storytelling, and it’s quite ancient, so I think falling into these stories from another time was really transformative.”
“Our ancestors were Scottish travellers, so their culture is very much rooted in the old ballads and handing down their oral history for centuries,” adds Clementine.
“They used to play to the kings and courts and all that kind of stuff!”
A shared love of stories and mythology has been with them from an early age and heavily influences their lyrics.
“As kids, we would interact with the place we were in by learning about its history and mythology,” says Valentine. “I think it’s just a fascinating way to write. It’s rich with metaphor and symbolism and all of those things that are fun to play with in writing.”
Originally from Christchurch, the sisters moved to the Coromandel Peninsula in 2016 after living in Hong Kong.
“We were struck by how beautiful the whole area is, and how much space there is,” says Clementine. “It seemed like a perfect place to come and make music away from the world in this incredible environment.”
“I think being out of the hustle and bustle has a big impact on how we make art, and it definitely comes out in the sound as well,” adds Valentine. “Being outside of the city and being so surrounded by nature has definitely seeped into the music in ways that we didn’t plan, and it’s influenced us – the change of lifestyle and being connected to nature and having a river in the garden.”
They view the isolation as conducive to their creative process.
“It means that we’re able to work on our music at our own pace and on our own terms,” says Valentine. “If you wanna make music that’s truly your own, it’s important to at times block out the world, especially during the writing process at the sort of embryonic stage of making music.
You don’t want to be influenced by too many outside sounds, other musicians or scenes. All that kind of stuff can be a distraction from making something that’s truly authentic.”
The Coromandel influence can be heard on Purple Pilgrims’ 2016 debut album, Eternal Delight, which was self-produced at home. While heavily influenced by the experimental noise scene the sisters were exposed to in Christchurch, the natural world is a definite presence on the album.
“There’s more naturalistic tones and textures, and there’s even some cicadas in there,” says Clementine. “They were really loud that summer when we were recording, but we ended up working with them instead of against them!”
“We’d been touring a lot and had written a lot of the songs,” Valentine adds. “Then we moved here and started recording straight away, so we were very enamoured by the beauty of the environment. I think that influence came through the most strongly in that album.”
They followed up Eternal Delight with Perfumed Earth in 2019. While their vocals were largely buried under layers of noise in the former, they are more clearly heard on Perfumed Earth.
2023 marked the beginning of a new stage in the sisters’ artistic evolution with the release of their more conventional third album, The Coin That Broke The Fountain Floor.
In a break from their usual DIY production, the album was produced by Randall Dunn, who has worked with such luminaries as Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Björk.
It was recorded at Circular Ruin Studios in New York. When it came time to release, the sisters decided a name change was in order. They released the album as Clementine Valentine.
“It was the experience of collaboration and because Purple Pilgrims was exclusively self-produced and quite DIY,” Valentine explains this name change. “When we did this bigger production with a group of collaborators, it felt like it was its own world and its own entity, so we decided that it needed a different name. That’s not to say we won’t go back to Purple Pilgrims in the future.”
The sisters have toured extensively around the world, both as headliners and opening for alternative heavyweights such as Weyes Blood. They remember a show in Aberdeen, the hometown of their folk musician great-grandfather Davey Stewart, as a career highlight.
“We played at a venue that our great-grandfather had played at,” Clementine remembers. “The support ended up playing some covers of his music, and they actually remember him, because he used to busk on the streets of Aberdeen. They had this whole surprise waiting for us, and they said: ‘You have to go and watch the support act, because they’ve got something special.’ That was an incredible experience, because we weren’t expecting it.”
Words by Nur Peach
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