Grimes Is “All Too Human”
The musician and producer shares candid thoughts about her Vocaloid collaboration, poptimism regrets and the difference between art and art machines.
Grimes is a catalytic force inside every scene she touches. Musician, provocateur, producer, techno-utopian and occasional heretic of the pop culture that shaped her early career. To know Grimes, parasocially or otherwise, is to understand her intrinsic ability to experiment with technology at an equal beat to the one at which she criticizes it.
Grimes’ musical accolades are only part of her story. What’s striking is her sensibility toward identity and authorship in the digital era. Technology doesn’t scare her. She wants to dive into its underbelly, into the mess of it, and find where responsibility and agency still live.
Examples of this in her resume can be infinitely scrolled.
Through her project Elf.Tech, she licensed her own voice for others to use, treating the exchange as an economic experiment instead of a threat to be litigated. She shares her opinions about machines, including an upcoming documentary about machine consciousness called First Contact, with a tenderness usually reserved for close friends.
It’s with this same tenderness and restless curiosity that she unveils her latest project in collaboration with virtual performer Hatsune Miku. Teaming up with Japanese Vocaloid producer SatapanP, they’ve released a new single dubbed “Miku-Maxxing,” built around the voice of Hatsune Miku.
Hatsune Miku started as vocal software from Crypton Future Media, letting anyone type in lyrics and melodies to make a computer sing. Fans ran with it, flooding the internet with their own tracks, and Miku snowballed into a cultural phenomenon with global fandom.
The debut is complemented by a music video that takes viewers inside a chaotic digital realm called Cyberland. Throughout the video, a lone protagonist navigates a decaying virtual environment beside Hatsune Miku. Visually, the piece blends pixelated low-poly graphics with textured animation and mixed-media design.
As the opening single from the forthcoming compilation EMERGE MODE MIKU, the broader project marks the launch of Dwango’s BEYOND BORDERS program, an effort connecting Japanese Vocaloid creators with US-based producers and vocalists.
The complete EMERGE MODE MIKU project showcases a broad range of musical talent. Beside Grimes and SatapanP, the roster features contributions from Odetari, George Clanton, Frost Children, slayr, XAMIYA, jon-YAKITORY and picco. “Miku-Maxxing” is available to stream now, with additional single drops arriving before the full EP releases this September.
Continue reading for a conversation with Grimes about making music with an avatar and what authenticity looks like in today’s internet era.
What did it feel like the first time you heard your voice next to Miku’s in the same track?
She has a prettier voice than me *weeps.*
Miku doesn’t age, doesn’t tire, doesn’t have a body to protect. What did collaborating with something like that teach you about the limits of your own?
The specter of death haunts me.
You’ve talked before about wanting to dissolve into your art, to disappear behind the concept. How does a project like this get you closer to that?
I feel all too human. All too mortal. I see Miku and myself, perhaps I have vitality, but at what cost? What am I but meat?
If Miku has fans who feel real emotional attachment to a character, what does that tell you about what people want from an artist?
I think people want art that is honest. This is very hard to achieve with digital characters. It’s not just the output but the time Miku has spent with us that makes her more valuable than many digital avatars. She is profoundly futuristic, but she is also kind of old.
You’ve lived through different eras of internet culture reinventing what “authentic” means. How does this project sit within or expand that?
I was one of the original poptimists, but I am really eating my words with that lately. I think the alternative is a necessity and it is meaningfully different from pop music. We need to delineate capital A artists from art machines and projects by big labels. We don’t make enough room for folk art as well, at least not in spaces of serious art discourse.
It’s not that some art is more or less authentic, but there is art that exists to make money and art that exists because the artist has no other choice but to make it, and after many years of touring and seeing all the sides of fame I decided I wouldn’t return to art unless I was firmly engaged in the latter.
