In Sydney for St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival, Claire Boucher had a chat with Chris Twite on Arvos about all the little pieces that make up Grimes: the music, the community and the visuals.

The multi-talented Canadian does all her own album artwork, but that’s not the part she finds challenging: “It was not very difficult, I just draw when I’m chilling… The music is the difficult part. For me, the visual part is kind of a no-brainer – it’s more about getting the music to a place where it fits with the aesthetics.”

Talking collaboration on her latest record Art Angels – which features guest vocals from Janelle Monae and Aristophanes – Boucher says she wanted to work with “super strong, badass women who could write”. She also expressed the importance of her friends and a positive community around her music: “In the scene that I’m from, everyone writes their own stuff… the scene is super crucial. I would not make music if I had not come from a super fertile music community that was very cooperative.”

Although she moved to Los Angeles to be a part of that scene, Boucher clearly wants no part in the media hype surrounding her critical success – recently taking some time out in Squamish, a small town in the Canadian woods.

“[Living in the woods is] very stressful. Because you’re in the mountains, you can hear choppers at night sometimes, and that always means someone has fallen off a glacier… Canada is very haunted. The wilderness is very haunted. You know, eagles, bears, scary sounds, the wind going through the trees at night…

It seemed like things were getting kind of out of hand… a lot of my friends, or people who were coming up at the same time, they’d freak out and do stupid stuff and it’d be in the press, or they’d get wasted at some party in New York and it would be in the press. I don’t want to fall into that trap, I just want to go somewhere where the only thing I have to do is make a record.”

And what might the next record sound like? “I really just want to make a gratuitous techno record with no vocals and see what they say…”

Listen to the full interview above.