Delirium at the Bubblegum Aquarium: An Interview With Crystal Sting

From field recordings to Miles Davis references, the debut album from Crystal Sting is the most interesting record you’ll hear all year.

Dec 10, 2025

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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.

Is Crystal Sting the main project you two are focused on right now?

Kurtis Perrie: I wouldn't classify it as the main thing. We both have so many things going on that I wouldn't say any of them are the entire focus. It’s certainly an important thing and it’s something we want to continue doing. We do shows every once in a while, that kind of thing.

Bjorn Kriel: What constitutes our musical lives is that no one thing really feels like the main thing, but any one of the things that we do is liable to take a lot of focus at different times based on who's interested and what shows are coming up. When Jeff and the POW crew reached out to us and had an interest, that definitely lit a bit of a fire for the project and for us to put more of our backs into it, so to speak. Part of the really fun thing about doing a lot of projects is it sort of feels like Crystal Sting exists within a community of musicians and people that we're inspired by in Toronto. Kurtis is working on some music with a friend of ours named Harry Bartlett, who's this guitar player now based out of Nashville. He's someone I went to music school with, who I've been playing with for years. Now, Kurtis has linked up with him.

Kurtis Perrie: We find a lot of ways where we’re collaborating. We were doing this before we put out any music under Crystal Sting. We work in a specific way where we’re still staying in a lot of different areas too, with friends and with our personal projects. It’s just a friendship.

Did you two go to the same undergrad?

Bjorn Kriel: No, we both grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia, but we didn't really become friends until we had both moved to Toronto. We had met a few times, but I did my undergrad at U of T for jazz performance, and Kurtis just started an electrical engineering program.

Kurtis Perrie: I’m in year two of a program for electrical engineering technology. I moved to Toronto for music five years ago just because I had a lot of friends from Kelowna out here. I worked in a studio for about a year and a half and was an audio engineer. I was producing my own music as well. I was starting to realize that I didn't want to pursue audio engineering as a full career, so I applied for school to get into product development in music. Around the same time, the studio I was working at burned down, actually, so it was a good time to change things up.

How did POW find your music?

Kurtis Perrie: They found us through my work. I put out a record three or four years ago now, and I think Sean Mishra found it because I had a track featured on Four Tet’s Spotify playlist. He gave me a call out of the blue, and we just started talking without any idea of where it was going to go. I would send him beats once in a while. We made this project in two weeks last summer. It felt like a good thing to put out with POW.

Oh, so it was finished and y’all thought it might be a good fit.

Bjorn Kriel: Yeah. I played on a couple tracks on Kurtis’ project Work. We had done a bit of live stuff and a few little recording projects here and there — just figuring out what the best arrangement of our workflow of electroacoustic improvising would be. Then, Kurtis started getting really into modular synth stuff around the time that I started getting really into mallet percussion. This is now just over two years ago. That was really when we started to discover something that was working live and also sounding cool that we were both really excited about.

Did you grow up playing percussion?

Bjorn Kriel: I actually didn’t. I was a pianist when I was pretty young. I started playing piano when I was about five years old. My grandma was a bit of a concert pianist, so she gave me lessons and then I got really, really deeply into rock guitar from ages 10 to 14. That was my whole life. I was playing in bands, writing songs, doing all that. Then I started to get into hip-hop a little bit, which sort of brought me to jazz and jazz piano. That was when I was 14, 15. Getting into jazz piano was really the advent of my musical life, the beginning of the trajectory I feel like I'm still on in a sense, where I pivoted my craft into becoming a jazz musician. The first half of my degree at U of T, which I started 2017, was studying jazz performance on the piano.

In the summer of 2019, I had some philosophical disputes with some of my professors, and I wasn't really seeing eye to eye with the mission statement of the program at that time. I dropped out, which ended up working out very well for me because the next few years would be online music school with the pandemic, and that just would've been total bullshit for me. I finally came around, ‘I actually do want to finish my undergrad.’ I had just worked one too many days in retail and it was time to go back to studying the blade, so to speak. Vibraphone and mallet percussions have always been a huge interest of mine with the kind of music that I'm into, especially a lot of the 20th century minimalism, like Steve Reich is a huge, huge influence for me. Midway through my degree, I just asked the program, ‘Hey, there is a vibraphone in the building. I know there aren't any people in jazz doing vibraphone, but will you just let me try? Just put me in any ensemble.’ I don't know when I'll have access to this again. I just got super, super obsessed with it and now it's a huge part of what I do in my musical life outside of school as well. I've just started my masters in mallet percussion, jazz performance.

Kurtis, how did you get to where you’re at now with production?

Kurtis Perrie: I started in piano lessons as well and got into drums in middle school, playing in jazz band. In high school, I had a jazz quartet and we would do a lot of gigging. Same with Bjorn, but he’s two years older, so he was the top shit in the jazz scene in Kelowna, which wasn't huge. His group of musician friends was definitely the group we looked up to. I would see him playing and it was really, really cool to see someone at that level. Yeah. We never really talked too much. The first time I ever talked to him was at a record store. He was working there, and I bought a National record, I think.

Bjorn Kriel: I think it was Kaputt by Destroyer!

Kurtis Perrie: Yeah, it was Kaputt, and we had a little bonding moment over that, but we didn't really start to hang out and make music until we had both moved to Toronto. I didn't start getting into production until after high school. I was just doing jazz. During COVID I went headfirst into recording music and got really into electronic music. Over the past six years, I’ve gotten really obsessed with recording, producing, and electronic music. That’s turned into an obsession with modular synthesis and getting really deep into that whole world, which has been a lot of fun.

How did you go about recording Bubblegum Aquarium?

Kurtis Perrie: We had done a few live shows and the record was a very similar process to begin with, where we would do 20 minute long live improvisations. 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.

Bjorn Kriel: 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. We would do these long form improvisations in the studio and we might bust out four or five in an afternoon, and then we would take the best ones and then slowly edit them down into shorter tracks. From there, we would overdub a few.

Kurtis Perrie: They'd be sitting around 20 minutes and we'd try and get them down to three minutes. Getting the whole aura of whatever piece we had done in three minutes was a good challenge and makes it more digestible for the audience.

Bjorn Kriel: “HD Umbrella” was a little different though.

Kurtis Perrie: Yeah, but once I had a song cut down, I would maybe add some samples over the top to emphasize what was already there. For “HD Umbrella,” we resampled the jam we had already created.

Bjorn Kriel: Kurtis had picked me up from the airport at nine o'clock in the morning after I'd just gotten back on a red eye flight and I did not sleep at all. I was just delirious. We went into the studio and the skeleton of “HD Umbrella” came from that. I have this vivid memory of being half asleep staring at Ableton.

Let’s talk about the aquatic vibes running through the album.

Bjorn Kriel: We didn't go into it thinking that we were going to do an aquatic themed record, but we just kept hearing things.

Kurtis Perrie: We were going with the idea of me building this environment for Bjorn to improvise in. It felt like a fish tank. It's like if you put his vibraphone into the ocean. Then, the name of the record came to me, and that was the first idea of where we were going to go aesthetically. I just thought Bubblegum Aquarium sounded cool. It had that dollar store vibe.

Bjorn Kriel: We’ve amassed a collection of little fish toys as we’re looking to make visuals and things like that.

There’s an amazing blend of playfulness and intellectual rigor on the album. Who are some of your favorite artists in that world?

Kurtis Perrie: The Books are a huge inspiration for me. Fennesz was definitely a big inspiration, too, with the way he puts effects on his guitar and makes these ambient beds.

Bjorn Kriel: With the way that I'm approaching the instruments, Ryuichi Sakamoto is a big influence. The Cluster and Eno records, the minimalist piano playing style. When we're doing the resynthesizing, it doesn't really sound like Crystal Sting if the harmony is too fast moving or too dense. There's a certain repetitive quality that goes into creating an environment. In our live shows, we can have a pretty intense dynamic range. We can get really loud and scary and really quiet and beautiful, too. I know it’s not music, but extreme weather events were going through my mind quite a bit while recording. There are a lot of field recording-type samples on almost every track on the record.

Kurtis Perrie: I felt the need to put field recordings really low in the mix to help emphasize that environment I'm trying to put Bjorn into. One that comes to mind is on “Strange Currents,” which at one point was called “Strange Traffic” before we really delved into the water theme. I have this recording of a big traffic jam really low in the mix. There's so much going on that it just blends into all the glitchiness.

Do you want to continue the next era of Crystal Sting immediately?

Kurtis Perrie: Absolutely. This record was created last summer. This past summer we did a similar thing. Maybe we'll put something out next summer. We've got some cool stuff I'm really excited about in the works, and we're always trying to do shows here and there when we can get stuff in.

Bjorn Kriel: I'm less tapped into the electronic music scene in Toronto than I am perhaps other scenes, just from the work that I generally do. A big mission for me this fall and winter and into the spring is talking to the right people and getting us into the right spaces in Toronto to really perform more often in venues that have really good sound systems. We want to be in spaces where the modular can fully express the deep quality of sound that are possible through the instrument. We don't always get that at our live shows. They always sound good, but there's a certain level of sound system that would make our shows sound tremendously good.

It bums me out that people are gonna listen to this album through laptop speakers.

Bjorn Kriel: I trust that the people who would be interested in an electroacoustic ambient record are probably the kinds of people who are at least throwing in some fucking AirPods or something.

The editing process y’all applied to Bubblegum Aquarium is becoming more popular in jazz. What inspired that?

Kurtis Perrie: At the very beginning we had a lot of talks about Miles Davis and how he would do that, having these big sessions and then cutting down the tape, especially on Bitches Brew.

Bjorn Kriel: Thank God we're not cutting tape.

Did the record reveal itself in that editing process, or was there already a pretty good idea of what it was before?

Bjorn Kriel: A good mix of both. The sub-bass sound sort of revealed itself over time and we ended up using it on a lot of tracks. I didn't really know that that was going to happen going into it.

Kurtis Perrie: All the tracks started off with us finding an environment to put sounds in, texture-wise. From there, it was just improvisation, and we just improvised until something was happening.

Bjorn Kriel: The tracks we've been working on recently, features a process that’s a little more produced and organized. For this record, a lot of things revealed themselves through experimentation and trust — honestly, just kicking it and enjoying ourselves. The post recording barbecue is a really crucial part for us.

Kurtis Perrie: The worst part about being a producer for me is getting stuck in a four bar loop and then building all this shit over it and trying to create a form out of that. It’s really daunting. But for us, we started with a 20 minute form and it was the opposite of trying to bring it back in, which was refreshing.

Bjorn Kriel: I've been finding while recording in general that even if there is a phrase or a rhythm or an idea that is a loop so to speak, I've been making a practice of recording myself playing the loop. If I want the same phrase over and over again for four minutes, I'll just record myself playing it for four minutes. The imperceptible and minute changes that come from being a human being playing it adds a certain secret sauce. It never feels like a loop. I have the Brian Eno “Oblique Strategies” deck, and there’s a card in there that says, “Repetition is a form of change.” I love that card.

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