>Grimes's 2012 album Visions is getting the classical treatment from Montreal-based ensemble Plumes.
>The group, which includes singer/guitarist Veronica Charnley (of Flotilla), composer and multi-instrumentalist Geof Holbrook and harpist Éveline Grégoire-Rousseau, commissioned composers to rework tracks to take Grimes’s subversion of pop traditions even further down the road of deconstruction. Composers include Nicole Lizée, Marielle Groven, Cassandra Miller, Emilie LeBel and Toronto-based Monica Pearce.
>It’s fitting that Pearce should find herself tackling a composition based on the music of Grimes, a left-field pop star who’s been outspoken about the lack of recognition for female producers and technical talents. The issue of gender equity in classical music is one Pearce has continually pushed, as former general manager of the Canadian League of Composers and now as executive director at the Music Gallery.
[...]
>What is it about Visions that lends itself to this sort of reimagining? >It’s really rich musically. The melodic aspects of the tracks are amazing. Veronica, Plumes singer, has this incredible voice but is very different from Grimes. It’s going to be quite different from the album, which I think will be really exciting.
>What was it like re-arranging Grimes in a classical context?
>The song I ended up using was Nightmusic and I must’ve listened to it 100 times before writing my piece. It’s a very electronic, synthy and reverby track. Plumes is primarily acoustic so the idea of translating that sound world for a chamber ensemble using unamplified instruments was really challenging but also interesting. Plumes have a harpist and I had written for harp before. Since they don’t have a percussionist, I ended up using the harp as the beat-making part, so the harpist plays the body of the instrument to get the percussion aspect of it.
>I tried to keep the vocals very similar to what is in Grimes’s track. I had to work pretty hard to transcribe them because she’s all over the place. There’s so much ornamentation and singing right before the beat. To get that notated was tricky but fun.
