Interviews and live sets from the New Zealand music underground. This week, we catch Whanganui's Castlecliff Lights.
Whanganui’s Ellen Waugh has been creating haunting ethereal songs about love, madness and aliens for the last four years under the moniker of Castlecliff Lights; a name that refers to her adopted hometown suburb and some mysterious glowing objects witnessed off the coast one night.
With this in mind, Waugh’s solo performances are an eerie amalgam of the X-Files and Gore’s Golden Guitar awards.
Channelling the spirit of country singers from Nashville’s heyday, Ellen builds her songs into a warped carnival of looped instruments and live vocal samples with a strong singing voice that swings between delicate and demented, the later augmented by a customised truckers CB mic.
Since releasing her debut self-titled album in 2011, Castlecliff Lights’ new material embraces a grungier sound while staying rooted in the emotional intensity at the source of country music’s greatest hits.
“I think a lot of artists are the same,” she says. “Where you feel like writing music when you’re feeling like shit or when you’re just starting to feel better, because when you’re happy you’re just too busy doing cool shit.”
Video shot and edited by John Lake.
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