imogen heap concert!

The Imogen Heap concert was fantastic! She’s really someone awesome to
watch live! Live looping, the performance, she’s funny and quirky and
dances about the stage and says funny things and really loves the
audience, her live versions soudn very different from the studio
versions, she’s a very good piano player and a very good singer
(obviously, but it’s more apparent live)… We saw all the songs Kid
Beyond did at the STarry Plough as I told you, except a new trance one which I didn’t like that much. I think I like
listening to Kid Beyond’s beatboxing a lot (it’s totally incredible)
but not his songs that much. They get old fast. Which is sad, I want
to like it, but I don’t really, it’s just too much noise and sometimes
there are very slight tuning issues when he harmonizes with himself
because it’s all live. And I don’t really like the melodies he chooses
for his songs. However, Imogen Heap’s usage of live looping is totally
different and vastly superior, even for her songs that are just like
Kid Beyond’s only in that she uses just her voice and no other
instruments (there was only one song like that, where she only used
her voice and a live-looper. There was one other song where she uses
only her voice and a vocoder: Hide and Seek, of course.) I want a
vocoder so bad. It looks like SO MUCH FUN to fuck around with. And a
piano! Imogen Heap has such a cool voice. I feel sort of like I never
want to sing again, because my voice is so bland and uninteresting and
offkey and whiny and nasally but yet I have dreams of it being good,
so I feel like it can never be as good as I wish it was. Haha. I also
feel so uncreative, like there’s nothing in me. I told you I would
write you a song, but I don’t know how! And some songs are so
incredibly simple, 3 chords, a simple melody, but they’re so
effective. How do they do it? I guess I must study songs, learn to
play them, learn what chord progressions work, learn more chords to
begin with… I think I do have a skill, and that’s harmonizing. I’m
very very good at harmonizing, if given a melody. I just suck at the
melody part, or coming up with anything original. Anyway, blah blah
blah. For some songs it was just her onstage, and she’d go back and
forth between all this equipment–her “parrot” as she called her
live-looping machine-thing, and like four midi keyboards (one was a
red keytar), and one electric keyboard attached to a clear
piano-shaped box lined with lights (fantastic!!!!), and an instrument
that I don’t know. I really have no idea what it was. Alex says it was
a “thumb piano” and it’s wires. ???? She’d play a bit on that, then
start a pre-recorded sequence using a midi keyboard, and sing, and
then harmonize with herself, and then play the piano. For some songs
she had varying numbers of people on stage. There was one really
extremely dorky guy who played a midi sequencer, the double bass, and
the french horn. There was one percussionist who played a xylophone, a
ridiculously tiny drum “kit” … no really, it was tiny, each “drum”
and “cymbal” was smaller than your palm. I’m serious. I thought it
MUST have been electronic drum pads or something, but Alex says
they’re really acoustic, just incredibly small, and miked really well.
That thing was cool. And they clearly had differnt pitches too. Anyway
he also played a regular drumkit. Then sometimes the first guy who
opened (who I missed mostly. I only caught part of his last song. I
was late to teh warfield, sad) came out and played electric guitar.
And sometimes Kid Beyond came out and sang a harmony or beatboxed.
That was pretty darn cool. Actually it was straight-up fantastic.

She played “Let Go” totally acoustically, on the piano, and the dude
played the double bass along with her. It was so beautiful. Gosh,
that’s such a good song.

I had good seats. The standing seats were sold out by the time I got
my act together to buy tickets, but I got tickets that were in the
center, in the second row of the upper (seated) level. So that was
fun. And I’m glad that I wasn’t standing, because I’d have gotten
tired, and since I was on the upper level I could see everything
better. The drawback of course is that it’s harder to dance. =)