Imogen Heap

From JoCopedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Self-produced, independent, engaged, she blurs the boundaries between pure art form and creative entrepreneurship. Heap has always communicated and collaborated with her loyal following (currently she has over 2.2m twitter followers alone) both on and offline in pioneering ways. This has included fans contributing sounds, words and ideas through her inventive Listening Chair project for example or taking on a whole city in China for her song Xizi She Knows.

Her graceful tunes such as signature track Hide & Seek populate movies and TV shows, accompany dance and theatre performances and more recently, have been sampled by a whole new generation of young rappers and producers. On the more commercial end and being an ‘artist’s artist’, Heap has penned songs for and with Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Mika and Josh Groban among others.

Her ‘Mimu Gloves’ project – a cutting edge experimental gestural music ware developed initially for Imogen’s studio and stage work – was premiered at TEDU Global 2011 and since has attracted worldwide interest from the New Scientist, BBC TV and radio, Wired, Dezeen, Mashable, the list goes on. Now Heap can be found collaborating and supporting new Mimu ‘glovers’ who range from pop starlet Ariana Grande to the the leading UK charity working in music, disability and technology, Drake Music. Other technology projects have included a generative and reactive music jogging app, explorations in 3D sound with leading engineers and technologists and Arboreal Lightning, a sound and movement reactive LED tree spanning over 1.5km!

In August 2014 Imogen curated and headlined a 4 day festival of contemporary classical music with heavy leanings in technology, bursting with installations to inspire at London’s iconic Roundhouse Camden.

Heap’s albums have been nominated 4 times for Grammys winning her one for engineering (the only woman to do so!), an Ivor Novello award and in 2015 saw her receive from the Artist and Manager awards, The Pioneer award.

Now looking to collaborate with coders, artists and companies, Imogen seeks the solution for claiming back and shaping the Music Industry 2.0. Yearning for music to be experienced ‘on tap’, as water, freely flowing. In so doing, remunerating all parties directly and instantaneously via micro payments using cryptocurrencies. Dipping into the possibilities of using blockchain technologies to release music, so to hold not just the music in it’s data but also the the license and credit information. Thus making both the sharing of on one side fair and using the music for commercial ends for instance on the other, an easy task.

Imogen is now adding to her roles, Mum, as her little girl ‘Scout’ was born in November 2014 on her living room floor. True to form of Imogen’s creative character to draw from and experiment with whatever may be going on around her at the time, Scout is the percussionist on Tiny Human, the first song after her birth.