Pure Sounds

"My 17-year-old sister is buying me alcohol downtown!” laughs Piper Kaplan, the 24-year-old who splits Puro Instinct with her younger sibling, Skylar. They're about to soundcheck for a show in downtown Los Angeles, the city in which the Kaplans grew up, and which their sound is intimately linked; both in their self-confessed “beachy melodies” and in their direct connection and similarity-of-sound to fellow LA-dwellers like Nite Jewel and Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti.

The debut Puro Instinct LP, 2011's Headbangers In Ecstasy, featured production by Haunted Graffiti's Kenny Gilmore and guest Ariel Pink vox, and the band had previously worked with ex-APHG and current Nite Jewel dude Cole M. Greiff-Neill on the 2010 Puro Instinct EP (“he helped the vocals not sound like muggy shit,” Kaplan says). And, Kaplan even shares the same mentor with Ariel Pink: home-recording originator R. Stevie Moore. “I was so depressed, disastisfied with my life, and bored,” Kaplan recounts of the band's beginnings. “I just thought 'I need a creative outlet'. But I didn't know how to approach that, because I don't really play anything, and who wants to just be the singer? That's just bullshit.”

Kaplan had grown obsessed with Moore after hearing his songs on a mixtape ­she also cites Merrell Fankhauser and Martin Newell as two key influences, thereby staking her claim for hardcore music nerd-dom and, inspired by Pink's urging, she semi-spontaneously flew across the country to DJ a show with R. Stevie Moore that she blagged her way into. Moore took her to his house, showed her his set-up, played her tapes, made new recordings in front of her eyes. “I saw how easy it was to put an idea you had, just that moment, onto cassette, where it's there forever,” Kaplan says. “I came home, hit up my little sister, and said 'let's try this out'. It felt really good, and like the right thing to do, and has kept me out of trouble ever since we started. Well, it's gotten me into trouble, too...”

Kaplan had grown up wanting to be a singer; inspired by an early television diet of Beavis & Butthead, Madonna's Truth Or Dare movie, Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Kylie Minogue (“I thought she was so hot, and I really wanted to be her”). Yet, after a failed talent show audition as a 10-year-old singing the Spice Girls' Viva Forever (“It was so fucking humiliating”), Kaplan kept her dream a secret. “I was really repressed and felt like I had zero business doing anything on stage until I was like 20.”

It was at 20 ­when Skylar was just 13 ­that the sisters began recording, in 2008, as Pearl Harbor. Their early sound summoned Fleetwood Mac's coked-out era with a muggy, audio-cassette quality that Piper saw as being reminiscent of the nth-generation dubs of Eastern Bloc pop she listened to. Even on Headbangers In Ecstasy, that tape sheen is still there; though it's a calling card the Kaplans hope to abandon. “There's only so much you can do with the cassette sound; I love the warmth of it, but it's limited,” Kaplan offers. “It's important for the evolution of our sound to move more towards digital recording... I want to retain that dreamy aspect, but I want it to be a dream that people feel they can be a part of. Like an HD dream, as opposed to a VHS dream.”

And with that, Skylar is back bearing liquor ­“she got tequila!” ­and Kaplan is left only to ponder an imminent trip to Australia; where the band will begin working on songs for their second album. Kaplan makes an off-hand reference to her “vision” for it, but won't be pressed any further. “There is a vision...but to describe it any way that would actually do justice to the intention of it might be a little bit difficult for me. Plus, I'm blowing the surprise.”

Puro Instinct will be playing the following shows: