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LIFE OF GRIMES
Canadian musician and artist Grimes shares the intense creative process that spawned her stunning new album with Camilla Pia, and addresses those ‘lesbian Satanist hooker’ rumours
The stunning future pop masterpiece Visions, by Claire Boucher aka Grimes, is inspired by Enya, Japanese anime, TLC and Aphex Twin and samples Renaissance composer Palestrina. Her dream? To be Timbaland and Lydia Lunch simultaneously and leave a mark on culture that will go down in history. If all that sounds a little deranged that’s probably because she’s a former goth and neuroscience student turned art maker and fashion icon, whose most creative periods are fuelled by copious cigarettes, solitude, speed and no sleep.
So when T h e L i s t calls Boucher at her Montreal base we’re expecting a hyperactive, occasionally nonsensical but ultimately super smart eccentric, and that’s exactly what we get; with a little bit of ‘sweetly precocious’ thrown in too. ‘I like going crazy,’ she giggles, wired as ever, down the line. ‘And not just for art, I like extremes in general. I’ve been awake since 2pm yesterday (it’s 7pm now) and I feel like that headspace I go into when I work is incredibly meditative. You are totally emptying your world of any stimulation at all and so your desire to fill up that empty void is intense.’ Boucher’s background is in ballet and visual art but after she posted a few early ‘experiments with sound’ online, blog hype hit and she
decided to ‘go hard’ on music, releasing a plethora of records – Visions is her fourth in a two-year period. ‘People were into it so I was like, right, I’m going to dedicate my life to this,’ she explains. No half measures when it comes to Grimes. ‘I’ve always been like that, though,’ she adds. ‘Even as a kid, as soon as I was able to read I would pretty much stay up all night reading. I’ve always been very intense about everything I do. With Visions I went really deep into it for three weeks because if you snap out of the mindset it fucks it up. Go back to real life and you lose the spirit.’ ‘I LIKE GOING CRAZY’
The challenge for Boucher is not being able to create, she does that constantly, prattling excitedly to The List about various video and painting projects she’s working on as well as a new album. But it’s how she refines her impulse-driven art that proves the most trying. ‘I find making something that is emotional and bringing logic into it really hard. But you bring it to the next level artistically if you can actually make it be meaningful . . . so it’s this difficult balance to get right . . .’ After the buoyantly catchy and cleverly
constructed Visions, which documents the painful breakdown of a relationship, Boucher’s become the talk of 2012 – something she’s intent on ignoring in case it affects her future output. Self-confessed loners with crippling stage fright make for awkward stars, right? ‘Well, I was incredibly unpopular in high school but also extremely notorious,’ she laughs, ‘there were all these rumours about me being a lesbian Satanist hooker, so I guess I was my own kind of celebrity at the time. I’ve always had this weird thing where I’m really introverted but also very extreme to the point of drawing a lot of attention to myself. I don’t really like the attention but I still feel compelled to carry on. ‘It’s complicated,’ she sighs, before racing onto the reason why she does it: ‘To change the way that women are perceived in music, the way that beauty is perceived, the way that music and fashion interact and the way that pop music and DIY interact. I just feel like there’s a lot to do and that I have a lot of ideas.’
No biggie, then.
Grimes plays the Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, Mon 7 May (SOLD OUT) and returns to play The Liquid Room, Edinburgh, Tue 28 Aug; The Arches, Glasgow, Wed 29 Aug. 26 Apr–24 May 2012 THE LIST 79