Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

I don't think you're in her demographic, sweet

i am not sure i can get with this girl's voice

probably an unfair comparison but i think of her in connection with gazelle twin, who i discovered at the same time on that sandbox thread, and gazelle twin's music is so much more affecting

very strange girl! (unf, i also think she might be one of those people for whom an accelerated hype-cycle is a bad thing. hope i'm wrong.)

I just got the press release.

Moving to Montreal from Vancouver in 2006, she developed Grimes among the city’s burgeoning DIY scene; a scene where both punk ethos and pop music collide, resulting in a distinct sense of community, religiosity and psychedelic revelry.

Were it not for the word "psychedelic" that description brought to mind mall punk.

This new set incorporates influences as wide as Enya, TLC and Aphex Twin, whilst drawing from genres like New Jack Swing, IDM, New Age, K-pop, Industrial and glitch resulting in a record that is both otherworldly and futuristic.

That mix of references simultaneously makes me cringe and curious.

lists of "influences" are always cringeworthy

an accelerated hype-cycle is a bad thing

It's interesting you'd say that! I'm excited for her success, in a "get money, find rat-free living" sort of way. And although I def feel there's going to be success for Arbutus in the next couple years, I can't say that cash flow + hype is going to have a necessarily positive effect on that scene

's musical output.

Well BRAIDS has already jumped up out of that scene and into hype, and Native Speaker was a gorgeous record. Curious to see if/when/what Blue Hawaii release next.

i am not sure i can get with this girl's voice

I'm listening to the split with d'Eon from last year at the moment and this is my main issue, although it's only a couple of tracks where it sounds annoying.

I listened to Halfaxa and wasn't really feeling it - did I start in the wrong place?

Yes, i've got an album by her and it's OK, but not much more

Geidi Prime is stronger than Halfaxa, imo.

But I dunno, it depends on what part of it you aren't feeling.

I think "Oblivion" - the first single from the 4AD album - is better than almost anything she's recorded.

"Oblivion" is awesome. Those synths sounds like universes collapsing on themselves.

Huh, weird, coz I think Halfaxa >>>> Geidi Prime, it's less focused but it's more ambitious and better realised. I don't hear Enya or TLC or Aphex Twin in her music, but it does give an idea of the scope of her range. But then again, at other times, I like her coz she reminds me of those 4AD 4-track weirdoes like Danielle Dax or His Name Is Alive.

Quite pleased that certain elements dislike her (heh) but it is distinctly odd to see her popping up in the NME every now and then. I think she might actually have the ability to sustain making good music despite the hype cycle - someone's third album is a much better place for the hype to kick in, rather than, y'know, the third song.

Damn, I wish I'd saved other links from my arty experimental gothy electronica sandbox thread. The only other artists I can remember having a consensus on were Emika and maybe Laurel Halo? I don't feel like starting it up again.

Barbara Panther, Niki & the Dove, Gazelle Twin, Julia Holter, and iamamiwhoami also got shoutouts.

And Austra.

this leaked. and it's good, but I don't think it will convince anyone who wasn't prone to be convinced by the previous stuff.

i really don't know what i think of this album

there are bits of it that are OH FUCK YES, and there are bits that i am just not down with and a lot of the time it's like she's nearly hitting the spot and then nothing happens

I'm loving the background vocals on Vowels = space and time.

Skin is also an early favourite.

Be A Body (侘寂) is totally going to be the next single, right?

This is an album of wonderful moments. Not all of them are 'songs' for me yet, but a lot of them are.

I quite like "Oblivion," not sure yet about the rest.

When is this out, properly? Really want to hear this, the comments are piquing my interest.

really digging this myself

from what I understand, this is out on either the 21st of this month (Arbutus, US and Canada) or the 12th of next month (4AD, most everywhere else). and I hope that previous comments did not imply that I lack enthusiasm. I love Visions a lot, but despite all of the pop aspirations it feels like it was built to inspire obsession from a limited audience.

She definitely has the charm and hooks to pull to a wider audience but her songwriting could use some editing... many times it does sound like the songs drift without any specific purpose and as a whole it drags.

For legit consumers, Visions streaming in its entirety

Can't. Don't have the bandwidth!

*cries*

Why couldn't this have been available 2 weeks ago when I still had all you can eat broadband?

Given there's nothing on the album I'm bored by, I think editing would inevitably mean reducing the idiosyncratic facets I'm charmed by.

Best thing about Grimes: she has such disinterest (contempt?) for lyrical content as she chirps through her baby birdsong. She might as well be the electropop version of Juliana Barwick..

yeh this is excellent

"skin" is very pretty, but a bit insubstantial, tho i guess "insubstantial" is kinda the point. soft, sweet, ghostly. don't hear no afx, but enya sure. and i don't hate enya, but i don't love this. got bored before the 6 minutes were up.

"oblivion" is much more immediate. the nothing lyrics are kind of selling me, "look into my eyes and la la la la la, see you on a dark night". that's great! love the synths at the end, too.

want more songs like "oblivion"

Be A Body (侘寂) is totally going to be the next single, right?

dunno, but it's v nice. enya influence is even more prominent at the beginning, but j-lo too? love the shift to dark propulive beats halfway through.

For lex:
Grimes namechecked a similar/sympatico artist Mozart's Sister whose voice might be more to your liking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy1u4v2LIfU

^ Also of Montreal.

I'm gonna bookmark this thread for when I've topped up my data bcuz "electronic Juliana Barwick" = WCC catnip if I wasn't onboard already (which I have been since Halfaxa)

so she made this on garageband, huh?

Mozart's Sister is also v. good!

They have a three track EP called DEAR FEAR from last year. Maybe they have other stuff too? Not sure.

yaaaaaarg, just listening to her stuff now (i'm always way late with everything) and enjoying it a lot. i just took a break from some incredibly bureaucratic shit at work to watch this video and i don't..think..i can go back to work again today

Skin reminds me of a mix between Enya and Natalie Imbruglia's smoke. Am I too off?

Really can't believe we have come to a point where evoking the names Stacy Q and Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam results in a positive fucking review. I give up.

I love this album cover!

http://www.tellallyourfriendspr.com/sites/default/files/GrimesVisions.jpg

yeah, is awesome. post in the best of 2012 thread!

after being completely underwhelmed by anything i heard of hers before this record (i'm kind of with lex on the voice thing), i'm really enjoying "oblivion" and "circumabient"

Fucking adore this record.

Funny that Alex in Montreal referred to Braids upthread as this album strikes me as something of an electronic equivalent, simultaneously tuneful and spacious and drifting (whereas I think Juliana Barwick is a bit of a misleading point of comparison).

"Skin" esp. is wonderful.

i gave this a few more tries and while there's nothing i actively dislike about her music, neither is there anything hooking me back in - it's all vaguely "interesting", also very unmemorable and lite.

cf julianna barwick who hooked me straight away, and gazelle twin whose music i absolutely adore sinking into. grimes has no gravitas.

the cover of this record is really really bad. if you're going to rip off the sacred bones design scheme (which i really love), at least do it well!

ripoff Sacred Bones serifs + some Cyrillic lorem ipsum + some 1994-bad-sci-fi-book-cover graphics + giant in-class notebook doodle-looking thing = a mess and I like it

Yeah that album was made 14 years ago and a lot has changed since then, hasn’t it?

This is no longer an “oh so kooky” indie musician shitposting on her tumblr. This is a grown-ass woman saying the child she had with one of the richest assholes on the planet is like the fascist messiah that was promised or whatever.

She might be joking but it’s easy to see why people would be rolling their eyes at that idea nowadays.

i wonder if janelle monae still has her back?

holy shit, my daughter was just using a GoKeys sample based synth in her music class with a preset called "TRY THIS" ... that's what the sound at the start of "Eight" from Visions is. Could never figure it out.

Always thought it was a sample of someone saying "Tardis"!

Grimes is trending on Txitter but all the tweets are about basketball and the Walking Dead

she's trending again due to her meltdown at Coachella which predictably she is blaming on everyone else

I've talked too much about it with friends already, but there was a strong air of "I started the assignment a couple hours before it was due" to the entire thing

the dj fuckups did manage to obscure coverage of the phenomenally bad AI-generated video art, though! there was some point where she was blending music from the score of Tenet (?) into some EDM song she'd sung over, and the video appeared to be an AI-generated death of Julius Caesar or something

oh, also she just threw someone under the bus in her twitter post apologizing. nagl

cyber influencer cosplaying as a musician, at this point

I mean I'm not much of a DJ but the explanation of "I outsourced the BPMs" makes no sense to me

honestly, the more resources she gets, the worse everything is

she really just needs to be left alone for a week with a clunky laptop that has fruity loops or something

that and the fact she's gone from synthesized/regurgitated tumblr to hodgepodge of twitter garbage/dark accelerationist claptrap makes it dire

xp to frogbs

afaict, she had a handful of pre-made blends that she did, some EDM songs where she'd sung over the top, and some assorted other musical clips that she was planning on using as dj set material. Rekordbox is the software that all of the tracks were dropped in, and what you'd use on Pioneer cdj controllers (they're not actually using CDs, they're just called CDJs for historical reasons)

So, Rekordbox does BPM analysis and track markers and all that jazz, so you can either pick songs by BPM or drop a track in to play next and it'll either do beat matching or speed up/slow down the track at your whim -- all based on that scanned BPM. It's pretty good! If it didn't pick up the down beat correctly or screwed up the BPM in the software, you can manually set sync points. This used to be something you'd have to do pretty often.

What happened was ol' Grimey finished selecting her tracks mere hours before her set. At different points, she says "I finished this two hours ago" and "This a new song of mine, I finished it eight hours ago". So less than two hours before her set, some assistant (?) was responsible for dropping everything into Rekordbox, loading it up to a USB stick or whatever, and plugging it in. Her claim is that the assistant fucked up the beat markers.

So, she never practiced the set using that final file drop, at bare minimum. The implication is that things were set up correctly at some point and it got botched in the final transfer, but that seems kind of suspect. I don't think she's ever practiced DJing that much, it's literally "I do my cool little edits and blends and drop it into the magic mixing machine and it makes sure I do not screw up that much"

notably, this is not the first time reported that she's not great at the actual djing part, it's just that this time the magic part was 100% off

if it was a mismatch with the equipment in the booth, that's something they probably should have checked out beforehand. Maybe her version of Rekordbox was creating incompatible files? Seems iffy, but something you could figure out at sound check. One would think you'd have done a dry run on the equipment, and maybe have that not-finished-two-hours-ago version as a backup in case something went wrong?

The other thing that's not been mentioned is there was a guy driving what looked like a robot crab around the side of the stage the entire set. At no point does Grimes acknowledge or approach the cybercrab

in case you're wondering, yes, I did rewind the youtube live feed and watch her entire show because I'm a masochist

I think her intention was to end the set by singing along to Genesis
HOWEVER
Genesis started playing at some crazy speed for about ten seconds, and which point the audio completely cut, and the video feed stopped showing that stage

I for one appreciate yr detailed analysis here!

Watched a clip of the ‘meltdown,’ tbh if it was anyone but Grimes with the Musk/Nazi/Skynet shit it probably would have been charming.

https://x.com/itspocketrocket/status/1779359580864356620?s=46

She should have had SALEM open for her

I'm sorry but how to you lose control of the BPM?

This feels like an argument for rockism.

Is it? It feels like it should be a standard question in dance music when beat matching!

I guess my question is, why not beat match by ear? Is that a wild idea in 2024?

the first few min of the set sounded very good but in retrospect also felt like a train barely clinging to the tracks, i def wasn't under the impression she prepared for it (like an incredibly smart kid who thinks they can bullshit their way through a paper.)

to be fair to the robot crab spider thing, she did ride in on it (awkwardly and slowly) -- it wasn't nearly cool enough to justify its continued presence but i felt good knowing that if this creature is the best the evil tech companies can come up with, we'll be pretty set in the upcoming man vs machine wars.

she showed up at some point last night during someone else's set, my friend thought it was her new fella's gig but idk.

sideeyeingchloe.jpeg

seriously. i had a whole heartfelt post written up about how this should sting extra as a former nightclub dj and such a huge fan of her music. it should, but honestly who didn’t expect something like this? the joke is clearly on us, guys. why shouldn't i just shitpost memes in response? i genuinely hope she's okay longterm. but in the interim, you get what you give afaic.

Her claim is that the assistant fucked up the beat markers.

Poor markers.

I traded in my Art Angels vinyl for seven bucks in store credit the other day. I'm sure I have music by objectively worse people in my record collection, but I can't deal with the unrelenting, embarrassing disappointment.

cyber influencer cosplaying as a musician, at this point

maybe understandable / acceptable if yr playing to ten mates in a bar, but beyond unprofessional / unbelievable to be so badly prepared in such a scenario.

a five year old could learn to do what she was trying to do in an hour. maybe two hours if also learning how to manage recordbox.

of course it's all actually a win as despite having some new haters she has managed to generate masses of brand awareness over this.

well put

If it is has happened before obv she should have initiated a CAPA plan and implemented a solution with the appropriate external and internal stakeholders

sounds like she did do an appearance at her boyfriend’s set that went fine! maybe she can consult him on where the beat sync button is

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlanPartridge/comments/1c4au6h/grimes_during_her_coachella_set/

https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/grimes-set-technical-difficulty-coachella-19402352.php

Such bullshit blaming her team. Her recent “dj set” on Mexico was similarly riddled with mistakes. Doesn’t seem like she gives enough of a fuck. It takes like a minute to analyze songs on rekordbox. Sounds like she can’t beatmatch or divide by two.

Her appearance at Anyma’s set was fine… if just standing there and doing some half assed performance at some animations is fine.

https://www.reddit.com/r/grimezs/comments/1c4d13x/he_really_gets_her_and_the_level_of_effort_shes/

Tbh given her past reputation as a Weird Indie Girl she could so easily go all out on the costume design/clothing at her shows and hire actual designers for original stuff but instead we’re getting not one but TWO colours of the Malenia Elden Ring 3D printed helmet that she can’t see OR mix a DJ set with

Am I hallucinating or did she start playing some vivaldi at one point?

I wouldn’t be surprised if she mistakenly started playing an audiobook at this point.

Von Mises narrated by Renato Marciano

(grimes presses play)

(hitler speech starts playing)

HEY HOW DID THAT GET IN THERE

Malenia Elden Ring 3D printed helmet

i wonder if the malenia thing is a dog whistle at this point, since the character is clearly modeled after the wagnerian brunnhilde