Music

Most producers in electronic music tend to work in a linear fashion: They start with a chosen style or set of ideas and move gradually forward with them, making incremental progress toward their larger vision. Not Beatrice Dillon. An unsuspecting listener presented with a half dozen of the London musician’s releases might easily assume they were the work of six different people. A 20-minute cassette with Germany’s Gunnar Wendel collected fragments of a noise performance; a pair of albums with composer Rupert Clervaux alternated percussive concision with freeform drift. Themed mixtapes—like a journey through Smithsonian Folkways’ archives or a guided tour of RVNG Intl.’s idiosyncratic catalog—comprise a surprising proportion of her discography. In the absence of anything like an identifiabl...

In 2011, Grimes was eager to say in an interview that she had “been studying pop stars.” Since emerging 10 years ago as a DIY ingénue out of Montreal’s freewheeling music scene, Claire Boucher has become known for her experimental production that often traded discernible lyrics for otherworldly and synthetic vocal textures. The words she sang didn’t figure into what made her music so fascinating—it was how she used her vocals to mimic whalesong or aliensong, a futurist reimagining of the transfixing voices of Enya and Mariah Carey, over irresistible melodies. Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms. Miss Anthropocene is Grimes’ fifth album and her first as that bona fide pop star—the result of widespread acclaim for both 2012’s Visions and 2015’s addictive...