on the path…Imogen Heap at the Wiltern
My perception of a band has often consisted of couple of guitar players and a drummer, and hopefully a keyboard.
Imogen Heap crushed this perception and redifined what a band could be in the matter of 45 minutes tonight.
Imogen Heap aka as Frou Frou (see previous comments for “November” post)
played the first of two shows tonight at an old Art Decco Theater called the Wiltern.
The Wiltern is a beautiful place. They gutted the seats to get more occupants in there but otherwise you could tell it had been there a long time and probably had a gynormous movie screen. Ornate too. Etchings, paintings and moulding everywhere. High cielings and a lobby with a bartender. I ordered an $8 Tanqueray that was served in a hard plastic punch cup.
I asked for two limes to help me stomach the price.
So who is Imogen Heap or Frou Frou, I should say? She’s a young, skinny, British woman who dresses as if it were the 19th century, but is a music technology master.
I read in the L.A. Weekly that we can thank Zach Braff’s (sp) ex-girlfriend for bringing Frou Frou to the ipod generation’s ritalin buzzed attention. I think she found a cut out at Amoeba music in Hollywood and turned him on to it. He liked it so much he put it in a movie.
Frou Frou’s song “let go” was featured in the movie “Garden State” & a movie I need to see I guess. A fluke happened and the soundtrack ended up doing better than the movie and the song took off. Sad thing is the band, Frou Frou broke up before the movie was released. So Frou Frou became Imogen Heap.
You know, I was just glad to hear a musician come up with something interesting and well done; using an amalgalm of music I used to listen to. If memory serves me, more than a decade ago there was Tori Amos pushing the envelope. Right when people thought that her kind of music and lyrics could only exist in the cutout bins, there she was on the radio with a voice and piano and chamber orchestra. Imogen has listened to a fair amount of Tori Amos to be sure. When Tori Amos branched out in the late 90’s & tried to integrate electronics and loops into her music; it just sort of missed.
Imogen, however picks this torch up effortlessly. Her main instrument is her definitely her voice in my opinion. The keyboard playing seems to be a vehicle for songwriting and programming.
She spins around while singing in a headset mic. playing all sorts of midi controllers, pushing buttons and flying in live vocal loops from a computer. Her rig included drum machines and keyboards shoved into a hollowed out Grand Piano shell.
Balancing out her electronics, Imogen used a kalimba thing, mounted on a large wood box that she liked to play often, through a barge load of effects.
She had a support band that consisted of a stand up bass/ french horn player, drumset/ vibrophonist, guitarist and: get this, a guy to beat box. Yep what used to be just in rap music and charachiture of itself was integrated seamlessly with electronic bjork-esque drum parts and live percussion.
The drummer played the tiniest drumset I’d seen in a long time. And it sounded as such. Let’s call it a Decaffeineted drumset. My ears enjoyed the punch of real drums though. Of course I’m partial to that.
So the band was very artistic. It was the first time I saw a pop band use bowed vibes. It was the first time I’ve heard a woman use a vocoder since Laurie Anderson’s, “Oh Superman.” It was the first time I heard a french horn run through an Eventide Harmonizer. The guitar player used a bow too but sometimes hard to hear through the mix.
It’s been a long time since a young band held my attention. But they did. The songs were interesting and resembled pop songs in form. The real art was witnessing expert integration of electronics and acoustic instruments in a live setting.
What was the response? The audience voted with 2 nights of sold out approval.
My thought leaving the Wiltern was:
‘what was unthinkable 10 years ago; performing interesting live electronic music, unfolded right before my eyes. How refreshing.
Thanks for checking in.
Stephen A. Thomas