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. =)