If I hear that name one more time I might...have to go actually listen to her music.
I feel like I keep hearing about this person yet I know next to nothing about her. Apparently she is a sort of "wiz" at the social networking aspect of the music marketing business (mainly YouTube and Twitter) which I always find pretty impressive, that is, the way some artists know how to use these tools and others just don't seem to get it. Well anyway, she just released a new album on August 25th titled "Ellipse" and its' creation and marketing/promotion were pretty intriguing. For a better idea of what I'm talking about check out the Wall Street Journal article below written by Jim Fusilli.
Also you can listen to the whole album HERE. Don't ask me why but I find it satisfying for some odd reason. It possess a sort of electro-poppy texture and a sense of emotion that just sounds...good? I dunno. If you are so inclined, check it out.
Arriving this week after what seemed like a lengthy gestation, "Ellipse" (RCA), the new album by Imogen Heap, is smart, textured modern pop, full of invention, personality and countless joys, much like the work of Kate Bush and Annie Lennox.
If you are among the approximately one million people who follow Ms. Heap on Twitter, as I am, you've been eager to hear "Ellipse," for she posted, at times charmingly so, about 1,500 tweets about making and marketing it. I felt so intimately involved in its creation that I'd forget it didn't exist in a final form until recently; I found myself trying to remember songs I hadn't yet heard.
The 31-year-old Brit began writing "Ellipse" during a spontaneous trip overseas. "I didn't want to be in London, where I'd be doing my washing," she told me last month when we met in New York. "I got my laptop, went to Google Earth and spun." She visited Hawaii, Japan, Australia, China and Thailand. While she was away, she wrote a dozen songs, six of which appear on "Ellipse."
Travel, she said, "put my brain in an interesting space." Classically trained on piano, cello and clarinet, Ms. Heap rented a flat with a grand piano in Hawaii. Work cut into her sightseeing plans—"I didn't get to see very much of Maui. I didn't want to feel like I'm slacking"—and she composed "Wait It Out. " In the full arrangement on the album, the song retains as its platform a piano figure, but soon it slides into a collage of voices—all Ms. Heap's. She made every sound on the disc.
Ms. Heap had decided the songs on her new album would be composed rather than spliced together from soundscapes she created. "The last album had bits of all sorts of stuff. I had to try to cram a melody over a back track," she said, referencing 2005's "Speak for Yourself." "This album sounds different because it was a linear process."
When Ms. Heap returned to England "with an army of songs," she moved back into her old family house in Sussex and built a recording studio in it. "As the scaffolding was around the house, I started to hear the floorboards, the radiators. I was fresh to those sounds and I wanted to incorporate them into the album. I took a binaural microphone and walked around the house for hours. The boiler, the washing machine, my fingernails on the banister—I recorded all of it. I brought the house into the music." The interior of the 200-year-old house, she added, is elliptical. Hence the title of the new album.
"Ellipse" is full of surprises. The percussion and colors of electronica are prevalent, often used in unexpected combinations with natural sounds. "Canvas" springs from a nylon-stringed guitar and syncopated rhythms, while "Between Sheets" balances acoustic piano with swooping, sweeping soundscapes and gently chugging percussion. "The Fire" is a delicate, haunting solo piano piece. Lyrically, a few songs tells stories seemingly culled from what happened to Ms. Heap moments before she set her fingers to the computer keys: A less-than-satisfying mirror image sparks "Bad Body Double," which turns out to be a song about self-doubt. In "First Train Home," she wants to escape a night out to return to work. The album's closer, "Half Life," is a heartbreaker, both lyrically and through the use of strings and layered voices.
"When I'm arranging music," she told me, "I'm trying to get to the core of emotions. There might be nice, funny bits of sound, but it's a serious matter."
Earlier this summer, Ms. Heap faced a moment a modern recording artist dreads. A copy of her album, sent to a reviewer in the U.K., wound up for sale on eBay. She posted a note about it on Twitter and many of her fans were outraged—we knew how hard she'd worked on "Ellipse." Now there was the possibility it would be widely distributed for free. Ms. Heap and her fans bid it up to more than £10 million to short-circuit the auction and eBay stepped in. (See http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy.)
The reaction of fans to her posts on social-networking sites and YouTube motivated Ms. Heap while she was working on "Ellipse." "I needed to know people were there and waiting for it," she said. "Tweeting and YouTubing made me feel like I was taking steps forward. The other thing is, I don't have a boyfriend. Now I'm on my own, rattling around the house. Twittering became a surrogate boyfriend. I was worried that it would dispel the magic, but it didn't."
(from WallStreetJournal)
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