BOUCHER: I mean, I think my sound is post-Internet. People my age had the Internet when they were kids. So I think I just had a really diverse musical background, but from a really young age. People who are 30 and older don’t have that—they were raised with genres of music. But people my age had everything all at once, and that’s why get Animal Collective and all these weird medley bands. Because genres are sort of disappearing, people just use bands as reference points. And if I were to describe my sound, I’d just say it’s “modern?”CHEW-BOSE: But you obviously love singing, so who did you sing along to growing up?

BOUCHER: Christina Aguilera, you know, crap like that.

CHEW-BOSE: We all did. Who else?

BOUCHER: Mariah Carey. I was really into Disney soundtracks, like Mulan and Pocahontas.

CHEW-BOSE: When you’re performing onstage, you’re Grimes. How do you prepare? Is there a specific mood you channel, or as soon as the music starts, it’s immediate?

BOUCHER: It’s different every time. Tonight, I was probably more caffeinated than is probably a good idea. Usually I drink a beer, take five lozenges, drink tea, and do a hundred or two hundred skips on the skipping rope, and then I go.

CHEW-BOSE: So now you’re based in Montreal; why do think there’s always so much groundbreaking music coming out of there?

BOUCHER: Well I feel like Montreal’s this sort of weird anomaly in Canada, because it’s pretty hard to leave Canada economically, but all of the cities that provide metropolitan benefits are very expensive, like Toronto and Vancouver. But Montreal is really cheap – so it’s pretty much the best place to be if you’re trying to be an artist, because you don’t have to pay a lot of rent. Nobody I know has a steady job, at all. Nobody. And we all just work on art all the time, and it’s really dark and depressing most of the year, so you work on art even more.

CHEW-BOSE: So in the Montreal music scene, what’s your everyday artist life like?

BOUCHER: Well I sort of lead a double life because I attend McGill University, or I recently got kicked out of McGill University for not attending. I was studying general Arts and Science degree, but I was in the electro-acoustics program, which is like psycho-physics, which I love. It’s the physics of neuro-biology, specifically related to music, and I have a lot of really good friends who study that. And then I have my music friends; I live with Marilis, who’s my publicist and is heavily involved in the label. My manager lives on my block; four of the apartments in my apartment complex of seven are people I know. It’s a really close-knit community, and almost everyone on these few blocks are artists or graphic designers, because we live right on the cusp of a warehouse district.