Grimes has issued an apology after “technical issues” interrupted her DJ set at Coachella.
Fans watching Coachella’s livestream over the weekend could hear her shrieking in frustration at times as she performed on the festival’s iconic Sahara stage on Saturday night. She ultimately addressed the situation in a post on X.
“I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight,” Grimes 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. i had a bad feeling beforehand not having run everything thru the cdjs myself and tho I flagged it I wasn’t insistent.”
grimes set at coachella 🤝 doing my taxes pic.twitter.com/8wxb0Z97Rh
— Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) April 15, 2024
Grimes’ ill-fated performance is an all-too-familiar predicament for DJs. Working in Rekordbox, the industry-standard program for DJ performance and music management, comes with high stakes. An artist may not have the proper drivers installed for the software to communicate with their device’s operating system, leading to corrupted files and incorrect metadata, like tempo and key.
The tempos from her thumb drive appearing on the Pioneer DJ CDJ3000 units at Coachella, Grimes added, were reading as high as 370 beats per minute. To put that into perspective, “Welcome to the Opera,” her hit collaboration with Anyma, has a BPM of 125.
Grimes’ polarizing response sent ripples through the DJing community on social media. While many criticized her lack of preparation ahead of a high-profile performance at one of the world’s most popular music festivals, others empathized due to the technological pitfalls of Rekordbox’s software.
“Oh man I feel so bad for her,” What So Not said in a post on X. “Girl needs a tech up there! It’s such a simple thing to fix/solve. Where’s her team at??”
“Nothing about grimes statement makes any sense lol I feel like she did this all on purpose for attention because, what? Stressing over your set for ‘months’ but not checking your music even once makes 0 sense,” Azzecca wrote.
Grimes also promised to fix the issues ahead of Coachella’s second 2024 weekend.
“I will personally organize all the files next week,” continues her post, which you can read below. “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 hand.”
I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight. 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…
— 𝖦𝗋𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌 ⏳ (@Grimezsz) April 14, 2024
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