Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

Her 2012 album Visions will be released on 4AD. Net strangers I've come to trust rate it.

The lead leak is electro-Frankie Valli.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpKqQ8fsBQs

We have a Grimes thread? Oh man! This is the year when Montreal's weird noise pop electronic stuff is going to get attention! Excited!

Looking v. much forward to this album. Vanessa was a highlight of 2011 and while 2009's Geidi Primes is still her best album, Halfaxa was good and her live shows have only improved with time.

oh cool - this was one of the things that lamp posted on his sandbox thread that i really liked a lot

New track available here. Good stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=olP3279j5_0

this one is the one I love (right now).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEeQ758ldqo

Whoa. I don't think I have that - which album is it from?

from what I understand it is another track from the new one.

terrible

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?

interesting list. if i were her i wouldn't have put nietzsche on the top, much as i love reading him, because it makes it seem like she might be a megalomaniac. the people i've known who were REALLY into nietzsche didn't seem as chill as grimes

shocking people didn't get the hint with her huck finn stunt.

I like nietzsche more now than I did then and Grimes less.

Good find

You told the podcaster Lex Friedman a couple years ago that you love collaborating with other musicians, because a human brain is one of the best tools that you can find. Has working with AI come close to that?

Not really. I’ve probably made, like, 1000 AI songs, and there's been one legitimately good one and one that's like an accidental masterpiece that is kind of unlistenable, but is very good nonetheless in its complete form.

Probably AI, in the short term, creates a bit of a renaissance in terms of what I do [as an] in-the-box music producer. But when it gets good enough, it's a lot easier than relying on other people, especially if I can be like, ‘fix the EQ on this,’ or prompt very specific things. I think people should just retain the art of creating things and retain the art of knowing things. So the more granular it gets, I think actually, the less sort of evil it is as an attack on the human psyche or the human ability to learn.

Overall, I think there's quite a bit of abdication of responsibility around what we are going to do as people's jobs start being taken fairly aggressively. Luckily, there's a massive population drop coming. So maybe everything is just fate and it's gonna work out OK. But I feel like we might get, like, very, very, very good AI across every pillar of art before there aren't any more people to make art.

https://time.com/7212502/grimes-ai-art-interview/

"luckily" wtf!

Pillar of art vs. pillar of salt

Stage two of DOGE

luckily a lot of people will die and we're going to probably get some good AI art

“Luckily, there's a massive population drop coming. So maybe everything is just fate and it's gonna work out OK””

By all means lead the way, you worthless dipshit

Not to defend but I imagine she's talking about the precipitous drop in the birth rate rather than some kind of massacre.

I got a strong sense of the kind of conversations she has amongst her rich friends there

Do you feel like people misunderstand Curtis Yarvin in certain ways? [Yarvin is a right-wing philosopher who has suggested replacing American democracy with a monarchy. Grimes attended his wedding last year.]

I have not actually read Curtis Yarvin, so I'm not going to make any statements about that. I think they possibly do, because I've met him. But I just am not familiar enough with his writing to have too deep of a take on it.

fucking cowardly bullshit slithering snake answer!

Some of Yarvin's writing from (his blog Unqualified Reservations) is so radically right wing that it almost has to be read to be believed, like the time he critiqued the attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik—who killed 77 people, including dozens of children at a youth camp—not on the grounds that terrorism is wrong but because the killings wouldn't do anything effective to overthrow what Yarvin called Norway's 'communist' government.

Even I've heard about what a nutjob he is and I live in a cave in Wales

Omfg claire shut the fuck up

in the video she apparently calls herself a "centrist republican" lol

it's pretty clear from her answers here that she's a fascist and is too ashamed to admit it. she's also still really stupid

On a different part of the political spectrum, I know you've interacted with Vitalik Buterin a couple times.

He’s a good philosopher king. My ideal situation is philosopher kings, like 12 of them. Vitalik, I think, is a very good philosopher king-type figure.

like the obsession with philosopher kings as the ideal form of government is a big part of yarvin's whole deal, but she doesn't know anything about his politics!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuA0oLxz-xc

Hate this lady.

Dear lord, that is a dim bulb.

"philosopher king, you have no pupils"

Person you used to get high with in high school has interesting ideas a decade later

^^ would make a good Cecily Strong Weekend Update character, imo

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts; medicine is magical and magical is art.

https://www.reddit.com/r/grimezs/comments/1j6d0jw/a_reminder_that_grimes_still_follows_this_vile/

Trigger warning for extremely racist content from this particular Twitter user who will hopefully one day be doxxed. It’s funny how someone who is, according to herself, absolutely ignorant about the political views of her friends, just happens to coincidentally connect with so many people like this.

She's DJing tomorrow. Looks promising.

https://i.redd.it/j8flec1ora4g1.jpeg

lmao

I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow!

Probably the least alarming concept for a Hamilton Nolan x Mr Beast collab.

If someone calls them magic mushrooms they are usually a narc

yeah but since people started calling regular mushrooms "shrooms" there isn't much choice.

is this actually a real thing? because I just woke up and I'm not 100% this isn't just a really lucid dream

had to look up who Bryan Johnson is. Oh right, an absolute class A cunt takes some halogenics. Well this could only be good if he has a very bad trip and tops himself or accidently eats a batch of poison and shits out his insides.

Wait why are we dragging Hamilton Nolan into this

forgot the reading glasses again

lol that shook me too for a second

Nightmare blunt rotation

Something tells me ego death will somehow be avoided

https://www.reddit.com/r/grimezs/comments/1r8d6e7/grimes_technofascist_party_with_curtis_yarvin_and/

embarrassing stuff. she had a moment where she certainly could have maintained a career as some kind of indie pop superstar as long as she was capable of making good music, but she threw it all away. but i suppose pathology is difficult to overcome, water finds it own level etc.

"These ideas, once the fringe premonitions of early internet cyberpunk, have started influencing the policies of the most powerful people on Earth."

I don't know if there's a distinction between 80s Cyberpunk and "early internet Cyberpunk" but this seems another case of fascist dummies embracing the stuff SF writers were trying to warm us about.

never trust a folk punk

Didn't read the article - was Jeffrey Lewis in it or something?

this is just the same story from a couple of years ago?

she had a moment where she certainly could have maintained a career as some kind of indie pop superstar as long as she was capable of making good music

I’ve found the fatal flaw with this statement

lol

xpost nah grimes used to be a dirty folk punk when she lived in mpls

crusty to rusty

I saw her play here back in ... 2015? My friend was hyped and it was pretty sold out, iirc, but I left unimpressed. And then began her descent down the rabbit hole. Maybe she'll tour with MIA or some shit.

i never bothered to see her live because i'd heard at best mixed things, she seemed to always be at home in the studio more than IRL. i won't defend her music, i don't care enough about her, and there are plenty of artists who do her thing without the loads of baggage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slL8IP7gJLw

when you need some Grimes without the Musk