Arthur C Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology eventually becomes indistinguishable from magic, and that’s exactly how it feels watching Imogen Heap perform. In this post I’m going to try and explain why. The only question is, where do I start ?!
At the heart of it all are the live-stream improv sessions. They happen once a week, every Tuesday, and are about to enter their second month tonight. They’re informal, intimate, inspirational and emotional. They’re at the heart of what Imogen Heap is doing right now. They bring it all together and make sense of it.
The format is simple – she sits down in her deep red semi-circular music room, at the piano she learned to play as a girl, and starts to play. The music could go anywhere – she makes it up as she goes along. Swirling, shifting, improvised strands that mutate and evolve as she plays, in ways that are sometimes fragile, sometimes strange, often beautiful and occasionally downright odd. And we get to watch, and sometimes take part.
She moulds the music with her hands. Quite literally – the cutting-edge Mi-mu gloves she wears are connected wirelessly to Ableton on the laptop beside her, and allow her to loop, reverse, pitch-shift, morph and twist the sound simply by moving her hands. She can reach out and pluck it from the air, sweep through it’s timeline with her hand, isolate something she likes and granulate it into a continuous drone, or add it to another layer, or smother it in reverb, or create a brand new loop... shaping the sound in a way that always reminds me of a conductor guiding the performance of an orchestra.
She’s been developing the gloves herself, along with her team, over the last decade, and after touring extensively with them last year they finally seem to have reached the point she always dreamed of, where they’ve become a seamless extension of her playing and singing. Almost like magic.
It doesn’t stop there, though. As well as improvising, she also plays covers. Of both her own songs, and of songs by other artists – requested directly by her fans. They’re there in the live comments on YouTube, and she chats with them as she plays, reading from the iPad balanced on the piano in front of her. Sometimes they suggest a key signature or lyrics, and she incorporates the ideas into her performance. This realtime interaction seems a bit like magic, too.
Many of the fans have been with her since the very earliest days of her career, and are subscribed to a dedicated app so they can keep up to date with everything she does. There’s a good chance that from there they’ve also signed up to a social media service called Discord, where they chat to each other (and often Imogen) about her music, other music they like, their pets, their heartaches and pleasures... almost anything, really. Some of them even use Tim Exile’s amazing Endlesss app to jam online with her – me included! Magical.
One of these fans, Marco Napolitano, has started helping her raise funds for something called the Creative Passport. It’s another project she’s working on – a kind of digital fingerprint that will provide any musician with the ability to keep all their work in one place. Music, lyrics, artwork, blog posts, videos, contacts and connections – whatever they like, really. Best of all, the passport will ensure you’re fairly compensated whenever any of your material is shared or monetised – automagically. As Creative Passport ambassador Billsy Bainbridge says – "How can you get paid if they don't know who you are?"
Until recently, Imogen had been funding development of the passport using the income from her magical score for ‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’, but all that has had to change during lockdown. She needed to find another way to keep the project going, and that’s where the idea of using the live improv sessions to help raise money came from. Groups of fans are clubbing together to raise money – £100 to request a performance of one of Imogen’s own songs, £500 for something by another artist, because they take more time for her to learn and practise. Examples so far include Kate Bush, iamamiwhoami and Foo Fighters – because, of course they do !
And if you think £500 sounds like a lot of money, that’s where Marco comes in. He’s been organising PayPal donation ‘pools’ where anyone can contribute whatever they like to help make an artist cover into a reality. This week Billie Eilish is the main focus of attention – a perfect fit for Imogen, since the song ‘Hide And Seek’ was one of the inspirations for Billie and Finneas’ song ‘When The Party’s Over’. If you contribute to a pool, you get to vote for which song Imogen should perform by the artist in question. And the results are pretty much guaranteed to be clever, quirky, moving, funny and more – or maybe all of them at once.
And that's still not everything Imogen is up to ! Hidden away in an obscure section of the app is Artificial Imogen – an absurdly ambitious attempt to create an online AI version of Imogen herself (!) to both help answer questions from fans and also connect the real Imogen with them more. Right now it’s just a place that you can ask questions, and if the app doesn’t already know the answer you might get to ask it to Imogen yourself, during one of the “Listening Chair’ sessions – live-streamed one-to-one chat . The chair lives in Imogen’s studio and is fully wired for sound and vision. Originally used during the writing of ‘Sparks’, her last album, it now allows her to livestream her conversations with the fans, recording her answers to their questions for future integration into AImogen's database.
And how exactly does all this creativity fit together ?
It just does, as if by magic. It always has. The key is Imogen, and her interaction with her fans. It’s the fans who chip in to hear cover versions by artists they like, chat to her on the Discord server, listen and comment to the livestream sessions and offer feedback on their favourite moments of the improvisations in the comments. And Imogen specifically asks for this feedback and reacts to it, because some of these spontaneous moments could become the seeds for new music that will eventually become something else. She says she finds it amazing the way people so often connect with exactly the same moments, even though they might be on opposite sides of the world.
Which is exactly why the live improvisation streams are at the heart of all of it. Imogen visibly thrives on the performances and interactions, often unable to tear herself away, streaming live for hours on end – over 6, on one occasion ! Watching an artist 'in the creative flow- in this way is rare and valuable – and the fact that she chooses to share it with her audience perfectly sums up everything that's great about Imogen. The live improvisations are where she's at her most relaxed, her most creative – and all the separate elements of this sufficiently advanced technological web come together.
In a way that’s almost indistinguishable from magic.
