To this day, Grimes’s 2012 album Visions is an electronic DIY masterpiece that continues to define the new millennial direction of pop music. And now her infectious rallying anthems are poised to win over a new audience, thanks to 13 Canadian composers who are giving the GarageBand-recorded LP a classical music makeover.
The concert series “Many Visions: Plumes Deconstructs the Music of Grimes” is breathing new life into the landmark record, systematically deconstructing and rearranging each of the Canadian musician’s original 13 tracks into something more befitting a black tie symphony gala than a 24-hour underground rave.
After the Montreal Plumes Ensemble mesmerized crowds with a classical-pop mash-up performance in March 2015 at the Cluster New Music and Integrated Arts Festival in Winnipeg, they began talks with the festival’s organizers about how they could take this idea to the next level. The event’s co-director Luke Nickel told Canadian outlet Music Works, “We wanted to see how we could bridge the gap between popular and classical music — we have a suspicion it’s smaller than people think.” From there, an Indiegogo campaign was formed in the fall of last year to raise funds for the project, resulting in a nine-city tour of Canada featuring Plumes’s reimagined renditions of Visions and spanning the entire month of March.
While Grimes has yet to give her official stamp of approval to the final project, Nickel said that he has hopes the Vancouver-native will “come to interact with us in some way.” Given the singer’s love of merging disparate genres and sounds while blazing her own unique musical path, we could easily see her deciding to pop by for a quick rendition or two of “Vowels = Space and Time.”
Tour Dates:
03/10 – Montreal, Quebec – Rocket Science Room
03/11 – Toronto, Ontario – The Music Gallery
03/12 – Hamilton, Ontario – The Casbah
03/13 – Windsor, Ontario – University of Windsor
03/15 – Guelph, Ontario – University of Guelph
03/16 – Kitchener, Ontario – Wilfrid Laurier University
03/17 – Winnipeg, Manitoba – Cluster Festival
03/18 – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan – Village Guitar & Amp Co
03/21 – Vancouver, British Columbia – Music on Main
Related: Why Grimes Is My Personal Pinterest Board
Credits
Emily Kirkpatrick
Photography Robert Kisby for Getty Images