Malibu/Interview

===Interviewhttps://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_vCY5Wwx9wBko8sxAB00cif_LhjKDlcb===
MISS DYSTOPIA
GRIMES’ DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
By Matt Diehl
"I feel like I’m playing a big game," explains Claire Boucher of Grimes, the moniker she uses for her musical and performative alter ego. Via Grimes, Boucher has transformed into a kind of mystical superhero, empowered with extrasensory pop-cultural clairvoyance, shape-shifting visual abilities and musical talents that allow her to create futuristic pop across genre borders that’s as experimental and strange as it is catchy. "Imagine the concept of engineering a pop star but using yourself in the experiment," Boucher adds, "I love the idea of engineering what’s coming culturally."
If this all sounds like the fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s pop-art dictums and predictions, you may be on to something. The future is here, and Grimes is likely to be famous for 15 minutes — but probably more. At only 24 years old, Boucher has forged a compelling mythos in just a few years that would take most artists decades, Grimes’ latest album, Visions, is proving to be one of the most significant albums of 2012 — a kaleidoscopic patchwork of deconstructed dance beats, shiny digital textures and scavenged samples, and pirouetting layers of Boucher’s scaring, high-pitched vocals. In a world of identical musical robots, Visions is a more a mad-scientist cyborg creation from a retro vision of tomorrow — both human and machine, a willful compendium of Boucher’s, well, visions of an idealized form of music shaped in her own idiosyncratic third eye. "I’d like to hope I make music from the future: I’m very good at predicting things before they happen," she explains. "A few years ago, I was listening to a lot of Goth and R&B — like Nine Inch Nails and OutKast — and I thought, ‘Why can’t these two sounds come together?’ Then witch house became a cultural phenomenon. Right now, things aren’t about technical ability or charisma. What’s more important is the ability to predict a cultural moment."
Grimes’ own moment was solidified in 2012, upon the release of Visions this past February. The influential music website Pitchfork gave Visions a stellar 8.5 rating and its coveted "Best New Music" status, calling it the "best album from one-woman project of Montreal-based Claire Boucher, [which] complicates the all-too-tidy "post-internet" tag by bringing into focus the many contrasts at the heart of her music: tensions between pop structure and diffuse atmosphere, between technology and the human body, between sensory-overloaded hyper-presence and transcendence. More solidly constructed and a lot more fun to listen to than anything she's put her name to so far, the electro cotton-candy of Visions is an inviting entrance into Grimes' peculiar kind of bliss." Indeed, Visions proved such a solid statement, it felt like a fully realized debut, an immaculate conception of an artist. In fact, it was Grimes’ third full album, after two previous efforts in 2010, self-released and fairly under the mainstream radar. In fact, the evolution of Boucher’s distinct Grimes persona had been evolving for some time. She grew up in Vancouver, Canada, in what she claims was a strict family. In time, she migrated to various pursuits — marijuana, ballet, comics, music, Goth, a dalliance with drugs (despite the intensive trippiness of Grimes’ music, she has been sober for some time). Much has been made of Grimes’ vivid, Asian-influenced style — at times she resembles a cosplay fairy princess plucked from the graphic pages of an anime or manga narrative — and she claims it stems largely from the influences surrounding her in multicultural Vancouver.
"My high school was over 50 percent ESL (English as a Second Language)," Boucher explains. "Our school system was so Asian, we got to take the day off for Chinese New Year! I was listening to J-pop and K-pop when I was 14, and now all these things are out there — a Korean language song like ‘Gangnam style’ can go top 40 now, which is so sick! I’m still so influenced by Asian composers, like Kenji Kawai, Yoko Kanno and the people that did the Akira soundtrack. In Japanese culture, there are strong female protagonists — they’re not just ‘cute’: think of Kill Bill. This has no parallel in Western culture. Here, Bella is human and Edward is the vampire; in Japan, the girl would be the vampire."
Fantasy plays a key part in her influences as well: "I love lord of the rings i love harry potter i love game of thrones i love mists of avalons," she recently tweeted.
Grimes’ otherworldly fairy tale really kicked into motion when she moved to Montreal to study at the prestigious McGill University. There, she flip-flopped across a variety of subjects — neuroscience, psychology, Russian language, electro-acoustics — while immersing herself in the city’s Mile End loft scene, where the local artistic outcasts and seekers would gather. "The only things going on were the parties my friends would throw — the same 30 people, the same bands, every week," Boucher laughs, "It’s so freezing, so you stay inside and make things." A now-notorious moment from that era that typifies Grimes’ freewheeling ethos. In 2009, Boucher and friend William Gratz built a houseboat, named it the Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, gave themselves the seaworthy names of Veruschka and Zelda Xox, filled the vessel with chickens and potatoes and attempted to float down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis — getting only a few miles downstream before authorities impounded their boat. 
Like her doomed riverboat, Boucher began to patch together a postmodern identity from the detritus of seemingly every youth culture mode: Burning Man, high style, low fashion, hip-hop, rave, high art, Goth, industrial, cyberpunk, steampunk, club kid, anime, top 40. Via Grimes, Boucher grew to willfully ignore genre borders and instead fuse links between them. She admired the transgressive performances of Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor, where they would cut themselves on stage, which she likens to "Marina Abramović, but going platinum." She calls "Stupid Hoe" by Nicki Minaj "one of the most assaultive pieces of music ever" — her own personal Rite of Spring. "I came from the noise scene, where making pop music was a controversial thing," she explains, "I became interested in doing something forward, but make it extremely appealing on a mass scale. Playing with a public platform is really fun. I’ll tweet something, and it will go out to 80,000 people. I enjoy having a ripple effect on culture and seeing what I can do with that."
One circle in which Grimes has had a particular impact is fashion. Style bibles like Vogue, V and W have all anointed Boucher a fashion icon — a development she finds most paradoxical. "That’s one of the things I find most amusing," Boucher notes, "I was unpopular and hated in my high school just because I looked like a Goth. It’s so funny to be accepted by the world that was the pinnacle of everything I fought against in mainstream culture. Fashion is a great art form, and I’ve found it’s actually cool. By engaging with a universe that represents this evil thing, it’s easier to change things within that universe." For Boucher, such divisions are no longer relevant, and Grimes is here specifically to change such rigid attitudes. "The distinction between ‘indie’ and ‘mainstream’ is no longer relevant," she explains. "Lana Del Rey, Charlie XCX, Bon Iver, Skrillex — they all represent the disintegration of the mainstream. A manufactured star like Sky Ferreira operates in the indie sphere; Skrillex is in the mainstream sphere but is in total control of his career; Taylor Swift sells millions of records but is female and is the sole writer on most of her songs. We’re in between two worlds, which is indicative of where it’s all going to go."
Right now, Boucher is working on where Grimes will go next. She’s holed up in her dad’schouse in Vancouver writing and recording for the next Grimes album. "I couldn’t enjoy a vacation," she says, "That might be weird — I don’t like sitting around. And I don’t like spending money, either. I would never buy a plane ticket to go somewhere unless it was for work." She’s rented a place in semirural Squamish near the mountains to continue working. She notes that in an appropriately supernatural pop-cultural coincidence, it’s close to where they shot the Twilight films and The X-Files. "I’ve got the Rockies and the ocean right there," she says, "It’s creepy, dark and pretty — a good place to make a record." As for the sound of the next Grimes album, expect the unexpected, "There should be more songs, and less ‘cool beats,’" Boucher says. Where her vocals were high on Oblivion, expect low tones; where Grimes lyrics once proved abstract, expect an emphasis on narrative and storytelling. "I like everything — even things I hate," she says, "That’s the key to innovation. It’s all about figuring out what’s new, what’s the last thing that’s still taboo. I’ve been really into hi-fi, clean music that’s really percussive and industrial. At the same time, I’m really into country and also the Russian avant-garde from 1910- 1920: Ballet Russe, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Nureyev. Putting country in with industrial music and modern art — that would be a cool discrepancy!"Category:Interview
Category:2013