in conversation with imogen heap
samantha hale says she is not a filmmaker. she admits to never having been to film school. and yet, her admissions form part of a voiceover at the beginning of her documentary titled map the music. part road trip, part soul search, it is an hour-long film that took hale a little over four years to create in the wake of her father’s death. devastated by her loss, she believed it was a love of music that helped her heal, and set about trying to examine if others felt the same way.
the film (currently available at insound) follows fans of musicians like rachael yamagata, kate havnevik, zoe keating and jim bianco. these aren’t ordinary fans though; they are followers who, like hale, walk in the shadows of their icons, trudging to as many live performances as they can in the hope of salvation. what hale manages to tap into and draw, in the process, is an interesting parallel between music and faith: a belief system of sorts that helps keep millions sane.
at the centre of all this footage lies the force that is imogen heap — the essex-born, grammy award-winning singer-songwriter, twitter-star and recent collaborator on acclaimed musical television series the dewarists. it is to heap’s live performances that hale, other fans, even other musicians, turn to time and again, citing the hold she has on her audience.
those lucky enough to have seen heap live will testify to her manic energy that drives every performance. surrounded by all manner of musical instruments, she flits across stage using what can only be described as microphones attached to her wrists, pulling and discarding samples at will.
when not on stage, heap comes across as calm, measured and — as i found out when i met her at a surprisingly quiet hotel in juhu, mumbai — completely at ease with the status she has long enjoyed. she helpfully fiddled around with my mobile phone’s audio recorder, coaxing it to life whenever it stopped (which was every five minutes). after a discussion that included everything from emerging technologies online to forthcoming projects in china, i was left with the sense that heap is an artiste more comfortable than most with pushing boundaries. it was easy to see why fans adored her. that she intends to play here again is testament to the fact that there are enough of us interested. for that, we ought to be thankful.
map the music tracks a number of hardcore fans who clearly seem to immerse themselves in the music you create. do smaller concerts, like your recent ones in india, come as a relief? are you free to play the music you want to, as opposed to what your fans demand?
i do actually have a set of songs i have to do, because i ask fans to vote in advance. the reason is i have so many songs and often go to a city where people like a particular one. there’s no way of knowing what they like in advance. this is my way of doing my best to democratise the choice of set-list and also to take the pressure off me in case they get it wrong.
why is your music not available in india? as an artiste, is there something you can do to persuade the music industry to take emerging markets like ours more seriously?
i have a major label representative in india, but i imagine one of the main reasons they don’t put the record out is they can’t guarantee a certain amount of sales. if it’s a big act, you know a certain percentage of people have probably heard it and will buy it. i have my own label and license the music, so i understand the difficulties. the amount it costs to put out a record, to manufacture a cd and market it, is immense — and i’m not trying to stick up for record labels here, but the proportion of illegal downloads to sales is so high here that it almost doesn’t give an incentive to a record label to produce anything.
i’m upset that people can’t go out and buy it legally, but i think we are in a transitional phase. the technology to download music exists, but we haven’t caught up with it yet. the industry hasn’t set a viable alternative to buying a physical cd. we can buy the download, but people are so used to not paying for music anymore that it almost seems like it should be free to a lot of people. we need to figure out a mechanism, a structure that makes sense for both artists and music lovers.
people don’t think about the person at the end of the chain. they feel that because the record industry has taken so much money in the past and made cds so expensive, the musicians don’t need it; but, actually, we do. i think places like india, china and indonesia, where people are enjoying so much music, is where money will be for musicians. it’s almost like the new frontier. if a structure did work out, where artists get paid micro-transactions for each sharing or downloading, you are no longer criminalising your fans.
i think one of the things made pretty apparent, even in the past year, is how much i can output creatively in such a short period of time, because the mechanisms are more in place. everyone is on vimeo, youtube and twitter, so one can connect with many people really quickly. for the first time, i am making films, compiling art with amateur photographers and paying them for their work. to combine all of this is exciting. it’s become more dynamic and immersive for me. even if everyone is sharing the creative process, i feel as if i have the reins. i feel almost overwhelmed by the possibilities.
how is your project involving ‘sound seeds’ coming along?
each song has its own eco-system. it usually has a project attached to it. i had a song recently out called neglected space, which i am most proud of because it’s not a song, poem or film. it has this middle ground that i feel i haven’t experienced before. this process of doing a song every three months has given me great confidence. i feel like i’m verging on things that are truly original, like nothing else on the planet. i wish i could do that every time.
connecting different worlds is leading me to be hyper-creative. with neglected space, i combined it with thomas, my partner in love and crime, where we got a load of friends from all over (they paid for their flights) and brought this old-world garden to life, with members of my local community. i’m excited by that physical manifestation of something along with the music. it opened my horizons massively.
i am now doing something ridiculously complicated — something i never thought i’d be able to do — in china, where i’m taking over hangzhou (capital city of the zhejiang province) for a day. i am curating 24 different events across the city over a 24-hour period. part of them will be musical accompaniments to everyday happenings. i want to connect local people with their own art. it’s a day in the life of the city. we’re making a 50-minute film out of it.
minds without fear has been doing really well in india. how do you prepare for a project like the dewarists, where everything is open-ended? how did the collaboration with vishal dadlani come about, considering the music he puts out is so different from your own?
i met vishal in singapore and instantly liked him. that is number one for me with any collaboration. i wanted to come to india to write some music, but didn’t want to go with the usual suspects like a r rahman, who is massively famous all over the world. i like the idea that, each time i do a collaboration, it’s a real random card. if i were to work with people who were similar, it wouldn’t push me creatively.
we had just four days to write and record this song, and i was nervous. what i think we ended up with is a total mesh of our work that shows give and take. he came with the idea of a poem by tagore. it worked very well because, on my flight over, i was watching something about the ‘arrow of time’ — the phenomenon of how entropy increases as time continues and things fall apart, disassemble and become smaller parts. i loved that and it connected with his idea wonderfully. there was no argument, it just felt right.
i don’t listen to music, strangely. i never listen to my own music unless i’m mixing it. when i have time i like listening to what’s around me. when someone’s around the house, i tend to put on an album called solo piano by this guy called gonzales. if i’m djing, i like things like dizzy rascal, john hopkins (one of my favourite artists) and people who exist in many worlds like ryuichi sakamoto, who can exist in classical contemporary as well as j-pop. i have a lot of friends who make music and i’ve met them along the way and listen to their work because it reminds me of friendship and touring.
