Before Grimes was a name anyone outside Montreal knew, Claire Boucher made a record in GarageBand while she was a student at McGill. Geidi Primes came out on Arbutus in January 2010 as 30 hand-packaged red cassettes and a free download. The UK label No Pain in Pop put it on vinyl and CD in 2011, and that reissue is when the reviews arrived.
Every title comes from Frank Herbert’s Dune, which she has called probably her favourite book. The album is named after Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen home planet, with the spelling bent. “Caladan” is the Atreides homeworld, “Feyd Rautha Dark Heart” is named for the Baron’s heir, “Shadout Mapes” for the Fremen housekeeper, and a levenbrech is a Sardaukar rank. She has also said she sang whatever came into her head and doesn’t like literal lyrics, so the book is a world to work in, not a plot to follow.
The method is the record. She learned to build loops after hearing Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, and most of the samples are her trying to play a MIDI keyboard, a violin, a guitar and a ukulele. By her own account she used only the white keys, pushed the microphone into the red and often kept the first vocal take, assuming few people beyond her friends would ever hear it. The first song, “Zoal, Face Dancer”, came out of a single all-night session. The rest followed in about six weeks.
“Rosa” is the most direct thing here: a stack of vocals over a bassline that never moves. “Feyd Rautha Dark Heart” starts from a cheap drum-machine pattern and builds with layered, chant-like voices, and it is the track critics singled out most often. “Gambang” has no words at all. Grimes picked “Grisgris” as her own favourite.
In 2011 the critics split on the limits. Some heard charm and a debut that gets a lot out of very little; others heard a sketchbook, with clumsy samples and vocals buried in the mix. Grimes’s own account leans towards the second view. She later called the record naïve, said she had been holding back, and described Visions, two years later, as the first album she made with real intent. Halfaxa followed Geidi Primes within the same year.
That makes Geidi Primes a document more than a destination. It is not where to start with Grimes. It is where to look to see how little she needed at the beginning: GarageBand, a few instruments she couldn’t play yet and a book she loved. By 2015 the 2011 vinyl was selling for up to 600 dollars, and Arbutus reissued it on vinyl in 2016.
