NOW Toronto/2012/Interview

===Interviewhttps://nowtoronto.com/music/grimes-4/===
Grimes
BY KEVIN RITCHIE
MARCH 15, 2012
It’s a measure of Claire Boucher’s new level of professionalism when, barely 12 minutes into our interview her minder gives the signal to hang up.
The 24-year-old who performs as Grimes has just released her third album, Visions, and is doing a round of afternoon press phoners from a tour van in Florida. Although she’s as chatty, engaged and effusive as she was the last time she spoke to NOW, she’s quite a bit more in-demand.
“That’s a really complicated question,” she replies when asked about her vision for Visions. “I don’t know if I can answer it in a couple of sentences.”
Just as well. We’re behind schedule.
A native of Vancouver, Boucher moved to Montreal to study at McGill but dropped out after falling in with that city’s music scene. In 2010, she recorded Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, albums of lushly dissonant synth soundscapes containing flashes of pop – a danceable beat here, a melodic phrase there. But it wasn’t until last year’s Darkbloom EP that she overcame her shyness and raised the gain on her breathy, high-pitched vocals.
Performances at SXSW landed her a booking agent and then the opening slot on Swedish singer Lykke Li’s North American tour. She quit her job inking comics, signed with indie label 4AD (she remains on Artubus in Canada) and recorded Visions, which retains the shimmering experimental ambience of her earlier work but grounds it in emotional lyrics and pop song structures.
“It’s thought-out and intentional. It feels like the first record I’ve really made,” she says. “The lyrics are about things. I don’t necessarily want people to understand them, but it’s not randomness. There was a point where [randomness] was really cool, but everything just ended up feeling kind of empty.”
Boucher is also attracting fashion world attention with her mystical-punk attire. She’s graced the pages of several high-end fashion mags. Recently, newly minted Yves Saint Laurent creative director Hedi Slimane photographed her wearing a Givenchy haute couture nose ring and chandelier-sized earrings for the cover of Dazed & Confused.
Initially, however, her forays into fashion were challenging.
“It was horrible, because everyone wants to sexualize you,” she says. “It’s been a good learning experience more than anything else it’s taught me to be very commanding and to be a bitch. If you don’t want to do something, you’re just not going to do it.
“Fashion can be a really powerful tool, but it’s also a place where you can be totally humiliated and have your power taken from you. I don’t want to have a sexual image. I don’t want that to be part of what I’m doing, but I want to work in fashion.”
Visual art is another area where Grimes is making her mark . On March 23, an exhibition and silent auction featuring her paintings and drawings alongside works by Toronto artists Dan Rocca and Alex MacKenzie opens at New York’s Audio Visual Arts.
“I think if you’re good at art you’ll be good at most types of art,” she says. “I can tell really early on in a painting if I’m going to toss it or not.”
She’s equally decisive when making music. “I start a lot of songs and throw them out because the energy is not right. It’s almost like the file becomes cursed. I have to delete it.”
The right energy is a feeling of urgency she describes as “upset, but not too upset.”
“Or sometimes really upset works. There’s a point where you’re in the right head space and you’re feeling fucked-up enough and upset about everything enough that you can make something really honest. That’s the best way to make good music.”Category:Interview
Category:2012