Tower of Sleep

29/m/Toronto. Recovering grad student. I write about music and contemporary art. Email: saelantwerdy [at] gmail.com

Grimes, aka 23-year-old musician Claire Boucher, talks of her music as “post-internet… The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything, so the music I make is sort of schizophrenic. Basically, I’m really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do.” Digital technology makes the artistic self at once hollow (buffeted by torrential, every-which-way flows of influence) and omnipotent (capable of molding sound and melding styles at will). Having access to so many resources and being able to manipulate them so extensively lends itself to a certain grandiosity. Grimes talks of being a maker of worlds and envisions her discography unfolding with Tolkien-esque endlessness: “I want to make a tome— access every genre of music, and also create new genres with them. I want to have, like, 30 albums.” Her forthcoming LP is titled Visions and apparently draws on everything from Enya to Aphex Twin, New Jack Swing to New Age, K-pop to glitch. This makes her an exemplary exponent of the new post-everything: a genre that refuses to make up its mind what it is or what it’s for, shifty and evasive, slithering hither and thither across the entire past and the whole wide world of music.

Articles: Maximal Nation | Simon Reynolds | Pitchfork

I’ve heard this about Grimes before, and her music definitely has an epic, sci-fi, world-birthing sweep to it (which is already suggested by all the Dune references on Giedi Primes), but this idea of her as a costume-switching curator just doesn’t jive with the consistency of her sound. Grimes is always instantly identifiable. She has an incredibly strong personality and aesthetic: she can contain multitudes and still be absolutely herself.

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