Grimes is the one-woman musical outfit of Claire Boucher, an artist and musician from Vancouver currently living and working in Montreal. Her album “Geidi Primes” has recently received a lot of alt press including Altered Zones and Gorilla vs. Bear. It’s now sold out at her label, Arbutus Records, but they’re letting you temporarily download it for free here (not sure how long this link is good for). She does all her own cover art. Like me, and I’m not even going to go into this or defend it, she’s a fan of Dune, the sci-fi novel series by Frank Herbert, published between 1965 and 1985. You can see this in the track titles: Caladan, Shadout Mapes, Feyd Rautha Dark Heart. I am interested in the album’s hybridization of musical styles.
Her bio at Arbutus Records: “Grimes is Claire Boucher. Lack of musical training yields unpretentious but compelling composition in which electronic and organic sounds come together in a colourful goth-pop-noise medley. Drawing from classical medieval chorale and synth-pop, among other things, Grimes fuses contemporary instrumentation with classical vocal practices from around the world.” She herself describes her work as “post-human liturgical majesty.” Gorilla vs. Bear: “With her debut cassette release, Montreal’s Grimes has created a beautifully hypnotic and eerily inviting soundscape by drawing from such disparate genres as dubstep, wobbly lo-fi bedroom disco, and more straightforward ’80s pop (see “Rosa”), all filtered through a strange, vaseline-smeared kaleidoscopic lens. Spooky coos and strangely familiar, half-realized melodies drift in and out from a distantly twinkling ether, as the tape plays out like a bent, no-budget dream collaboration between Kate Bush, Nite Jewel, and Paavoharju, as produced by the low-end theorists at Hyperdub.”
Update August 2011: a year later, here she is in the NYT magazine:
yeah! thanks for the music tip!
I think she’s about 19!
Sweet!