Grimes screams on stage after facing 'major technical difficulties' during Coachella set
Ben Thompson
Featured Image Credit: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Coachella
It's a big deal for any artist to play at Coachella, but Grimes' set may be one she'd want to forget.
It started off strong, with the singer entering the Sahara Stage at Coachella in a futuristic walking machine.
A strong entrance which would then be followed by 50 minutes of technical difficulties, however.
Advert
Around halfway through her DJ set, she had to restart Music 4 Machines numerous times as the song was playing at double the intended speed.
As she scrambled to fix the issue, she told the crowd, as reported by Variety: "This is a difficult thing to explain but we’re having a major technical error. Don’t judge me for being bad a calculating things.
"All my tracks are double tempo and I can’t do the math. They’re borderline un-mixable, so the rest of my set won’t be mixes but it’ll still be fun."
Grimes struggled to remember the tempos of each song in real time and as things got increasingly chaotic, she began playing unreleased songs instead - including some that had been recorded days prior.
In between each track, she would pause and let out a few screams, insisting it wasn't 'actually her fault'.
She fumed: "I'm trying to think. I'm not good enough at math for this s**t."
Her final song Genesis got cut short as she exited the stage.
She later took to X to apologize for what had happened.
"I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight." she said. "I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself - to save time this was one of the first times I've outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm's and letting someone else organize the tracks on the sd card etc."
She added that she'd had a 'bad feeling beforehand' due to not running everything herself even though she 'flagged it I wasn't insistent'.
"The big lesson for me was a mix of
1 if u want it done right, do it yrself
2 be a c**t even if ppl feel bad
3 probably pretend it's fine and engage w the crowd rather than spend a whole show slumped over the desk trying to fix software when ur meant to be entertaining.
"I will personally organize all the files next week. I will not let such a thing happen again. I've spent months on this show, making music and visuals, and admittedly am not in the best mood atm
"But, yeh - next week will be flawless, everything will run thru my hands."
She said it was 'some good lessons learned' and that the CDs were 'showing me bpms like 370' so she couldn't mix it manually by ear, as well as the 'front monitors being off', describing it as 'sonic chaos'.
"Plz forgive me! Love, always." she ended her statement.
UNILAD have reached out to Coachella for comment.