The Brag/Interview

===Interviewhttps://issuu.com/skb1969/docs/brag_488/23===
﻿Grimes
On Dancing And Dualisms By Amelia Schmidt
"Hey this is like, uh, Grimes, or like, Claire or whatever..." - Grimes doesn't know how to use Skype, so she just calls me instead. The 24-year-old is almost equally respected for her experimental, dreamy electronic music as for her role as a tastemaker, aesthete and burgeoning fashion icon, and she's heading to Australia next month to blow minds and win hearts at Meredith Music Festival in Victoria, and a series of sideshows. (Hopefully, that is - a few weeks ago, she cancelled her entire preceding European tour for health reasons, rumoured to be tinnitus). 
Proficiency with electronic musical equipment aside, she's clearly not a fan of VoIP, and when my phone rings with a blocked number her Canadian accent surprises me; I'm halfway through browsing her Twitter feed and crossing a question about K-pop off my list: Grimes is very open about her interests on social media, and she's recently posted about her number one K-pop love, G-Dragon's new single, 'Crayon (Crib notes: G-Dragon is the superstar Grimes of Korea, a fashion icon and trendsetter as much as a music icon, and part of Big Bang, one of the most successful boy bands in Korea. He's 24, androgynous and raps.) "G-Dragon is definitely the pinnacle of pop for me," she tells me. "Have you seen the video for 'Crayon'? It's INSANE. I think he maybe came out in a song recently? It was like, switching between he, and then she, the whole time. I was like, 'Woah, that's pretty ballsy to openly be bisexual...."
Grimes' addiction to K-pop is fascinating. Compared to shining K-pop idols like G-Dragon, she is notably less high-production and less glamorous, instead pursuing a deliberately grungy, industrial-influenced garage-nymph vibe. But K-pop is still a huge influence. "I think it's great. [K-pop stars] really use their music videos to their advantage," she explains. "In Western pop videos, we have that [money], but we don't do anything with it and it's just really boring... With K-pop they have these huge budgets, and they really just use it to make something awesome. It's like what a cloudy pop music video should be. People think that it's really corporate or whatever, but you can't deny that it's just really well done.
"The other thing that I think is really great about the K-pop style is the choreography. It's always really, really good, and I think it's something that I've taken for granted - how effective that can be," she goes on. "Like 'Gangnam Style'; all the viral videos that get really, really big have intense choreography. People just love watching really good co-ordinated dancing; I don't know why, but that's a thing."
In her videos, Grimes definitely dances. 'Genesis' opens with her dancing in the headlights of a car at dusk for three friends; it's mesmerising, and yet starkly natural and free. Her videos aren't choreographed - she's never even taken dance classes. "I did ballet when I was younger, but I've never done hip hop or anything," she admits. "Actually for the next album, with all the videos, I definitely want to do some choreography." The videos for Visions were completely improvised, she says. "They were made on a tight budget - it's usually like, I'm in the city for a week, and that's the longest time that I'm anywhere." Choreography, more than anything, takes a long time, and time is something that Grimes has very little of at the moment. "It adds a week or two to a video. I mean, [trying to get] everyone to learn a dance! You'll be in the studio every day for a week, you know? You can't half-arse it."
It seems that choreography would fit better on her next album, with its apparently more controlled and focused direction. "I want to be simultaneously more acceptable and more experimental and weirder, if that makes sense. I want it to be really clean, like the cleanest thing, but I want it to be a lot weirder, especially vocally," she explains, suddenly emphatic. "I want it to be a lot more aggressive and violent, and I want to use a lot more industrial beats, with really sparse instrumentation besides the percussion, with the vocals really clean and up front. I want to write really catchy vocal lines; good pop songs that are also minimal and industrial at the same time."
It's a Nine Inch Nails sort of sound that seems to form in my imagination, which is unsurprising seeing as Boucher's youth was spent in goth and industrial circles. But the blending of 'alternative' with 'mainstream' strikes me as something that could anger purists. "It's definitely become clear who my real friends are," she laughs, reflecting on her more mainstream success. "But real friends don't judge. When people are engaging in a type of art form where the point of it is that you're remaining alienated from mainstream culture, [you] should be accepting everything - so... whatever."
"I feel like it's the same with K-pop," she explains, neatly bringing us full-circle. "People refuse to accept that it could be art because it has money behind it or because it is kind of mainstream. Like Ciara or Nicki Minaj; people don't think they could be innovators or interesting. I think Nicki Minaj is like weird, noisy performance art most of the time. It's not even enjoyable; it's assaulting and abrasive, but crazy. But because it's mainstream, a lot of people won't even look at it or try to find out what it is." It's a double-edged sword that Grimes is willing to wield. Pop success with integrity and style may not be totally impossible: it's dreams like these that make her one of the most interesting artists of our time.
What: Visions is out now 
Where: Oxford Art Factory
When: December 10 & December 11
More: Also playing Meredith Music Festival, held from December 7-9 in Victoria
Category:InterviewCategory:2012