Catherine McCandless’ new solo project Riches shares debut single “Spirit”

Riches is the new solo project of Catherine McCandless, lead singer of Montreal, Canada’s Young Galaxy. In 2018, McCandless and her husband Stephen Ramsay decided to put Young Galaxy on hiatus after releasing 6 critically acclaimed albums in 11 years. Seeking a more conceptual approach and to re-invigorate her creativity, McCandless spent the next year immersing herself in folk horror films, occult poetry, hauntology, and sample-based music.

Riches’ debut single, “Spirit”, is darker and more urgent than any of her previous work. Led by McCandless’ distinct and powerful vocals, the song evokes intensity, melodicism, and a hypnotic drive. You can watch and listen below and read our interview below!

What makes ‘Spirit’ different from your past work? Can you describe the concept behind the track?

‘Spirit’ is the first song we have recorded as Riches.

Riches is essentially a project about my internal art world. I mean, it is the place I draw inspiration from when I’m writing, when I’m singing, when I’m trying to source a fresh and fluid perspective in order to find places of movement in an something that seems unmoving and flat. I think I was circling in that place, looking for the movement and inspiration, when Spirit was written, but it is literally a call to the feeling, it is me asking it to take me over and rewire my synapses for change and spark. Though it is the first song of many, it is the first performance of a call, a movement, an opening of a portal to what is outside what is seen, what is fixed and understandable. It is a calling for the blur, the nuance, the in-between, the transforming, the not-here-or-here-but-everywhere.

Whereas my past work has been a dialogue, and has, at times, had the intention of speaking to the coming together of people – it has had aspirations outside of myself – to reach out to people, to soundtrack some aspect of their lives and mine.
Spirit is more like an emission, like an SOS call. I wanted the song to be the performance of the solitary trek into the unknown and that ritual calls in the real power, the Creative Force – at once life-giving and destructive. It’s a high stakes time for me, so no biggie … but basically Spirit is my blood sacrifice to the Demon Mother. 🙂
Anyway..

musically it is a rough, repetitious, and hypnotic. It is an exercise in entering the soothing chaos of abandon. It was recorded to document this ritual that i had begun in response feeling ineffectual – like I was calling into the wind – and but at the height of my powers. So ultimately, it is a very pointed, personal scouring of the soul with the intent of harnessing something in me that without ritual, sacrifice, repetition, I just wasn’t able to deploy. I am searching transgression for the scent of inspiration, so the song, and Riches generally, need to have me playing with my frontiers.

How would you describe your artistic evolution throughout your career?

I think in the work I do, what has always interested me most are the frontiers. In my earlier work I was trying to find them and within them work to reach people and my process reflected that, we were making more accessible music, heart on sleeve. It has evolved though over time to become more about either stretching frontiers or using them to give myself parameters to work within for the challenge of it, or for the aesthetic palette and tone it would create. Now I want to cross my frontiers and play with the points of crossing, hold them open, be both in and out at the same time, it makes me less definable and categorizable in the ‘real world’, but more accurately myself. I feel confined and misunderstood and inauthentic if i am boxed in and I don’t feel comfortable under a banner despite all the real and mobilizing reasons to stand for so many things I support passionately. I think it has let me create a whole new site to speak from – from the portal, from the transformative. I am speaking and creating from my own real now and the frontiers are like deep doorways in thin walls – they are both in and out. My artistic process now is about practicing, about exercising the musculature that allows me to live on both sides of the frontier, to breathe water and air.

What’s been the biggest change in your life over the past year?

I would say it has been the return of my sense of agency and purpose within the work I do. But actually … more explicitly, it is the return of a sense of worship in my life. I have, in the last few years, very distractedly and busily just gotten on with things that I could see before me and that needed doing. There is a tremendous and gratifying feeling of completion for me in having concrete effect on ‘real’ things. But I find inspiration and healing in stepping somehow outside it all, and into the ‘other real’ that I may not perceive , but feel. I guess that’s why I call it worship. It is a devotion to something ephemeral and to me, it’s a place. It is where I think art comes from, where all the intuitive, nuanced, inexplicable, things exist – in the grey-zone, out of the corner of your eye perceptions. I also feel that in sourcing this other real, and drawing on it for the music making and writing that I do, I may be somehow doing work that is letting inspiration and healing into the regular, seen world. So my portal-opening has value to me on multiple levels.
So, I guess you could say this year I have regained my self again: I have rebuilt a shrine at the portal to the other realness, because that’s where I last glimpsed my creativity and all of its power to tear me down, connect me, use me, love me and resurrect me.

What song by another artist do you wish you had written?

There are so many.Today, I’ll say Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, because that lyric is just so deadly. so beautiful.

And finally, where can readers keep up with what you are doing?

on Instagram: @r1che5
on twitter: @r1che5
bandcamp: https://r1ch3s.bandcamp.com

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