C90: imogen heap, "hide & seek"

: )

ta for the tips

So I went back and listened to not only "Hide & Seek" but Imogen's first album (which, sorry to report, just isn't as good as I thought it was 7 years ago, ouch the lyrics Imogen, throw out that diary! - though two b-sides still stand up, the DJ Shadow knock-off "Wireless" and the deliberately ugly "Leave Me To Love", and I guess I'll check for album track "Come Here Boy" out of loyalty) and brainstormed.

All I could come up with was two suggestions:

1) some New Buffalo, like the second half of "About Last Night" and "Just A Little Time". Neither of these songs go quite as Cher's "Believe" as they threaten to (which is a shame) and maybe they remain a bit too winsomely indie, but they're both lovely, and what they share with "Hide & Seek" is a vision of love failing in a high tech future (reproduced in the music in New Buffalo's case: on that first ep it's got that Avalanches woozy cracking vibe overlaying the evocations of tech - synths and vocoders - like yr watching an episode of The Jetsons on a damaged tape).

2) less formally similar but somehow closer, some Jane Siberry, like "The Lobby" and "The Taxi Ride", which is appropriate because Jane recorded her own Laurie Anderson homage (though "Mimi on the Beach" is not a suitable recommendation unfortunately). What these songs share with "Hide & Seek" is (simultaneously and respectively) a sense of choral multitudes and perfect starkness, and that sense of being love songs from the end of time, like the collective consciousness of the universe is painfully reconciling itself to an inevitable but long-avoided splitting in two. I highly recommend these Cozen if you haven't heard them already, they also share a certain something with The Blue Nile.

On this last point... in another thread Mitch (as Jermaine) complained about Pitchfork's treatment of "Hide & Seek", which was to celebrate how it stripped "O Superman" of its pretentiousness - as if the alterna-rock langue which Imogen has at her disposal is the only proper voice for emotive pop music. I agree with Mitch, not least because such a treatment ignores the way that "Hide & Seek" works by doing the very opposite and much more interesting thing, dragging this alterna-rock langue towards a place where it can understand "O Superman" - the sense in which "Hide & Seek" works is a sense which renders the details of its lyrics functionally irrelevant, cowering before the grandeur of its contours, its formal affectiveness.

We are confronted by this critical presumption hat the beauty of romance in the love song is in the stringing together of personalised details, the production of reality. I'm interested in how stuff like "Hide & Seek" (despite some of its lyrics) and Jane Siberry ballads and The Blue Nile present love as something very metaphysical and non-personal but no less deep, a sort of collective understanding of the collectively unknowable, that space where "O Superman" and a three-minute pop song are one and the same.

I'd just like to pick this out and leave it here, like an echo

Hanne Hukkelberg - Ease (in C mix)

I'll try to remember to yousendit a live version of the former tomorrow. I'm getting a turn back you poxy fule type server overload message from the ysi site at the moment.

Oh, what the hell. Here it is anyway:
http://s62.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2919QXEMVOEP61A6OG06GJX46X

I have started using the name 'techmo' to fix what we appear to be skirting around on this thread.

[I haven't forgotten about the MoM YSI and will get it up here when my broadband is working again.]

Lali Puna - 'Alienation' (from Faking the books)
Broadcast - 'You and me in time' (from Tender Buttons)
Efterklang - 'Collecting Sheilds' (from 'Tripper')
My Bloody Valentine - 'To Here knows when' (From 'Loveless' / Tremelo ep)

I too had wondered about the extent to which certain Radiohead tracks could fit on such a C90 (Packt like sardines..., everything in it's right place, idioteque). At times, they have a complimentary sound but it's a differently directed sadness that they express. Depends whether you want to wallow in society's misery as well as your own.

There's a bit of me that thinks you could get some Ivor Cutler on there as well but I'll need to do a bit of digging to find exactly the kind of thing I mean.

Kidding. How about Hector Zazou's Songs from the Cold Seas, with various singers?

God, this song...fuck.

i just saw some song that samples this pretty liberally?

Yep, it was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBI3lc18k8Q

i just saw some song that samples this pretty liberally?
jason derulo

The Derulo track was used for a hip-hop dance routine during So You Think You Can Dance last night

btw no mention yet of the SNL parody that used this track
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD9iJgFBxbE

master looping "just for now" live at some radio station:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25VGdNU3nrU

I didn't realize "Whatcha Say" sampled "Hide And Seek." I just thought they sounded similar.

that derulo sampling is kind of both terrible and amusing enough to justify itself

God this song... sucks

no i like it