The Travel Almanac/Interview

Interview
Photoshoot
===Interviewhttps://www.reddit.com/r/Grimes/comments/vaqz2c/grimes_for_the_travel_almanac_i_decided_to_post/===
After graduating high school in 2006, Claire Elise Boucher relocated to Montreal to study neuroscience and Russian language. It is here that she first began writing music, releasing early works in 2007 through her Myspace account. The degree was eventually eschewed, but the wheels were already set in motion for a project of a much grander scale. Under the moniker Grimes, Boucher went on to release her debut album Geidi Primes in 2010. But it was her third album Visions, released two years later, which was undoubtedly Grimes breakthrough moment. Featuring synth loops and layered vocals of tantalising complexity, the album became a platform for experimenting with other genres such as R&B and drum&bass in later releases. Like her music production skillset, Boucher's visual art abilities are self-taught. This DIY mindset has resulted in a catalogue of albums with artwork in complete harmony with its music while providing Grimes a much-valued sense of ownership over her identity and career. Her inimitable, manga-infused style also features in her gig merch, a capsule collection of T-shirts for Saint Laurent, and an innovative digital art collaboration recently auctioned through the blockchain. It is perhaps Grimes adventurous spirit that leads her to so readily embrace the benefits of technology. In addition to being one of the first musicians to profit from NFTs with her WarNymph Collection Vol.1 drop, she is a proponent of AI, questioning the assumption that it would be inherently hostile to humans should it become self-aware. Grimes has aspirations for creating and touring a digital girl group named NPC-a gaming acronym for Nonplayer Character. And the video for her most recent and Spotify most-played release Shinigami Eyes is a digital masterpiece. Made possible by a recent switch to Columbia Records, it features an augmented warrior-elf version of Grimes and was filmed using xR (extended reality) technology. Given her willingness to venture into the unknown and passion for interstellar sci-fi epic Dune. it is somewhat unsurprising that Grimes has expressed plans to follow Elon Musk to Mars; the father of her two children X and Y--the latter of which was recently born by surrogate--has long been vocal about his interplanetary retirement ambitions. In this conversation with TTA family member and former cover star Eartheater, Grimes goes deep into heavenly bodies and the impacts of their alignments, the challenges of juggling making art with being a mom, and the mutual evolution of technology and human consciousness.
So where are you right now?
I'm in Austin, Texas. Where are you?
I'm in LA, but I mostly live in New York.
I love New York. 
It's so brutal and it sucks my blood. But I love it. 
So we're both gonna be on the cover of The Travel Almanac... 
Yeah, I can't wait to see. Your makeup looked so good when you sent me that little teaser. So, I have some questions and shit, but I feel like this will unfold as a conversation or whatever. 
Yeah, I should just stop doing interviews, and if I need press, it's just a conversation with someone cool. 
Yeah, I don't know. I'm super piscine and fucking passive a lot of the time.
Oh, you're Pisces too? 
Yeah. I just sort of throw myself into these embarrassing situations.
Me too! 
And I feel like there's some weird sort of masochistic thing there. This spirituality of embracing embarrassment and how you overcome it.
I literally agree. I've been trying to deny horoscopes my whole life, and I've just been relenting and falling into it lately. I don't feel Pisces, but I set up these things that I have to endure somehow. And while I'm doing it, I'm like, 'Why did I agree to this?' 
I have to learn how to say no to things soon because I literally don't think I can fit every- thing in. I am about to start just saying no to everything so I can go back to the studio and start making music, because that's my fucking favourite thing to do.
That's the big issue. I think when your art project first blows up, the hard thing is making the time to make more art. After Visions, like before Art Angels, everyone was like, "Why did it take so long?" It's like, "Man, there was two years of non-stop Trello, and at a point, I had to start saying no to good things 'cause I needed to actually make an album. 
Yeah, I mean, because otherwise you're sort of threading the needle through itself at a certain point. I don't know where I read it, but you isolated yourself for Visions, right?
Yeah, because there's an aspect of, if you want to get away from your old material-- if you're just out there being the thing you were--it's really hard to come home at night and take off that cloak and get into something else. It's very important, I think, to break, break, break from the old thing. 
I love the way you said that. I feel that so hard because I'm right now making a new album. Last year, I finally moved to my own apartment, where I could live alone for the first time ever. And I suddenly just felt it, like a deposit, plopping out of me.
You have to create that space for yourself. If you don't do that, then you'll never get it. At this point in your life, when you have kids and stuff--it's just, people are always mad at you for it. When I make art, I'm al- most in trouble for it or something. Which isn't bad, it kind of makes me want it more. 
Yeah, I can't believe you have kids. Oh my God, for the first time in my life I've been thinking, 'Am I actually going to have a kid or am I not?
I think the biggest thing, honestly, is just, like, food. It's been a huge reform to have to switch to healthy food and stuff.
Did you breastfeed? 
Yes, I did breastfeed. I guess it was good. It was rough, though. It made me like, when people say they don't want to breastfeed, maybe don't. Also, X is like the biggest baby on the planet. And I'm like the smallest person on the planet. So I feel like most people wouldn't have the same problems I had.
They have such healthy formulas now too. 
They do have really healthy formulas. I feel like people should chill on the guilty shit about breastfeeding.
Yeah... So you're just coming around the bend towards astrology. When is your birthday actually?
March 17th.
Wait! I'm March 16th.
What year?
1989.
You just missed the year of the dragon. 
Yeah, I know. I'm year of the snake--another scaly one. 
Kind of makes sense though, that you're just one serpent off, because we're very similar, but you're more sexually liberated. I'm not like super sexy or something. 
I definitely do get pretty heavy-handed with like the sex thing. But I mean, sex is oozing out of you. I've been watching you over the years and just the way you move- you're slinky as fuck.
But I have literal Catholic repression or something. I get this stress in my heart that's like, 'What's grandpa gonna say?'
But that just makes it even hotter, right?
Does it!? [laughs]
Yeah, I mean, I was raised pretty religious...
Is your name actually Trinity from a religious sense? 
No. no. I named myself Trinity. My parents call me Alexandra, but I added Trinity because I felt that a name can be a form of organisation, or it can be a form of activation. And Trinity just activates me.
I feel you exactly. That's how "C" is for me. The speed of light-299,000 miles a second. 
Fire! I love that. ..Now that I am in my early thirties and experiencing the medium of time in a different sense, I've been thinking about perception of time. You can interpret this in any way you want, but do you ever think about time as vertical instead of horizontal? 
Wow! That really changes the vibe. For some reason, it scares me and gives me anxiety. It's kind of like, the stakes get higher as you get farther from ground. But it's also interesting, because the further you get from the ground, and the more in space you are, the less it actually matters. 
What do you think about song lengths and attention spans right now? 
I was literally just working on two songs that are both so long. Sometimes I go overboard and make really long songs and it's not necessary. But I just so love
long-ass songs. 
It becomes sort of a movie, right? It becomes sort of a world.
Do you know Time by the Pachanga Boys? It's like 11 minutes long or something.
I don't know that. I'm going to write it. 
Hilariously, I heard about this song because Paris Hilton played it at Burning Man, and I was like, 'Wow! Paris Hilton is a pretty good DJ?' If there's one thing Paris Hilton can say to make herself more of a mystery to me, it's definitely, "Listen to the song Time by the Pachanga Boys, which I played at my sunrise set?" (giggles). Yeah, it's very deep, like a whole mood. Whenever I play that song at a party or something, it just takes the whole room into a vibe for a 10-minute period. 
I feel like for the first time, I'm really seeing how cool it is to play with time as a musician. Especially in the time of TikTok, where everything is like this tiny, little squiggle-sound earworm that just penetrates your brain and hits some sort of emotional excretion. You get that thrill, and then you just need to hit it, hit it, hit it. It's like that 15-second loop or whatever, versus a sound creating space and atmosphere. 
Yeah, I super agree. One of the things I love about dance music, it's not for the phone, it's for being out. Y'know, it's for the real world. There's this dichotomy of creation at this point, where you make stuff either for the phone or for the real world. And the real-world stuff is rarer but more valuable. 
So, we should talk about what we will be doing together?
Yeah, so we're just doing our song. We really need to think of an extremely sick music video for this. 
Well your last video for Shinigami Eyes was so fucking gorgeous.
Thank you.
How long did it take you to make?
It took a very long time. There was a lot of pre-production detail. It was a very intensive situation. A lot of stuff, pre and post. But really cool technology.
Do you like choreography?
Yes, I do.
I feel like making something beautiful. I just love the way you move. It's very intuitive. We should do like a dance or something. I feel like our bodies could be cool moving.
Some kind of choreo-orientated thing... 
And that's also just what I'm yearning for. Like, my body just wants to move. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I have this feeling of being cooped up or controlled for the last two years. But I have this desperation for really splaying my body out.
Every time I have to choreo for a music video, my life changes. I used to dance a lot when I was younger, but I haven't formally danced much as an adult besides music videos. And it just reignites a part of my brain that was active when I was a kid. It really gets you into your body. I think it would be a really sick idea if we did some kind of dance video, but trippy somehow-- like meta. 
Do you ever feel like you've left Easter eggs through your work that connect?
Oh, I leave Easter eggs through my work everywhere, all the time. Sometimes I subconsciously leave them and I don't even realise it. 
Exactly. I totally know that feeling. It is so exciting when you realise you have popped one on yourself. 
Do you ever go back to your old work and find little things? And you're like, I'm the only person who will ever see this. 
For sure. But then I do love to see how the mega-fans will decode a lot of it too. It is really beautiful.
It's really cool. But yeah, I'm especially interested in the unintentional Easter eggs. In Player of Games, having the knight be in armour and me be naked- I hadn't even dissected the symbolism there. Really, I hadn't looked at it at all. And then we put it out and everyone was so crazy about that; we were just going for pure aesthetics, and then in retrospect, it was like my hand was subconsciously painting this picture or something.
I guess I'm just also interested, as time goes on, in collecting data and making my own study on it too. For instance, after I broke up with my ex of many, many, many years, the first three people I slept with were all Scorpios, born in the same year, in the same week. I guess it could be coincidence, but I was like, 'Well, I will just collect that data. I'll write that data down.' And you know, as time goes on and the data compiles, you do see certain patterns, which is really interesting.
The thing is, not that astrology is real point-blanks--there probably is stuff that abides by the laws of physics, that feels like magic or that we refer to as magic: the heavenly bodies are exerting gravitational forces upon us; we have menstrual cycles that sync with the moon; our bodies are lined with time; we are subject to the exertions of the universe. The time of year that you're born, you know, and the mood everywhere when you're six weeks, or 10 weeks, or coming into consciousness--the mood everyone exerts on your being, there probably is quantifiable effects to that. 
Actually, I gave a friend who runs a pretty successful company, and she has a lot of data on people and does, in a professional setting, all the Myers-Briggs and everything. And she was like, "30 percent of my company is Capricorn," or something like that. She has very extensive data. I did a podcast called HOMOTECHNO about it with her actually. She's trying to run horoscope-y stuff through math and aligning it with personality tests. And it is interesting, taking the scientific method to these kinds of things that people assume are antithetical to science. 
I love seeing the aesthetic glory of patterns in science that bridge these sort of esoteric things. Like the helix, for instance. 
The thing that truly made me a spiritual person is when I did this class in college called Psycho Physics--which is honestly the sickest title and obviously the professor was sick--and it was about physics in the brain and how particles actually move at a quantum level or whatever; the universe seemed so organised, it just didn't make sense. I was like, 'This is just super divine.'
Yeah, I remember watching videos of physicists getting glassy-eyed talking about the God particle--like certain things that are just so beautiful...
It just makes you feel that we live in some sort of organised universe, whether it's by nature or design, something happened here that's not just random. It's truly beyond intricate, like, deeply intricate. And if it's accidental, it's almost more beautiful that it became this way. Have you read Novacene by James Lovelock?
No I'm gonna write that down too.
First of all, he was 99 when the book was published. I love the idea that you could still be doing your best work at almost 100 years old. It's a really, really cool book. It posits that the consciousness now on Earth is our brains coming alive and perceiving ourselves. This is the universe opening her eyes, as if each of us is a neuron in the brain of the universe. When you look at social media, and you look at the collective society getting online and becoming this like singular body, it's like, Whoa, is this the universe actually waking up? Is this the beginning of the brain of the universe?' Just sort of like connecting dot to dot to dot to dot. 'Is this just evolution?'
There's definitely steps in evolution, for sure. I'm so curious to look at MRI scans of brains pre- and post-social media. 
Yeah, me too. Well, I know that when you are playing video games and you have your map on or you're using Google maps-so you don't have to memorise the space but you can see where you are--it deactivates a part of your brain and causes atrophy. That is so interesting to me, that you can be in active mode and if you create a shortcut in the real world like Google Maps or the map in your video game--it'll start killing the part of your brain that memorises the streets. Because your brain is like, "There's an outside tool that does this. I don't need to do this anymore."
It's like an external hard drive.
We also approach that as if it's inherently bad, but maybe that is evolution syncing with technology. Like, that part of the brain is inefficient; do I really need to memorise the streets of Austin? Or can Google Maps guide me forever more, and I just don't know anything about the streets of Austin? And then there is a lot more space for other things.
More space for fantasy and love and beauty. I feel like all the computing should definitely be taken care of by computers--let our brains just enjoy... 
Yeah, computers are almost made for exactly that. Maybe the future of consciousness is like a symbiosis where, all of the computation is outsourced. And then we just get to be purely creative.Category:InterviewCategory:2022