Imogen Heap, Roundhouse - music review

As technology crashed around her at every turn, Imogen Heap showed charming, witty grace under great pressure
Witty grace: Imogen Heap (Picture: Amanda Rose/Photoshot/Getty)
John Aizlewood26 August 2014

It promised so much. The Reverb festival dedicated to contemporary composers with a technological bent was meant to climax with curator Imogen Heap unveiling both tracks from her new album Sparks and the high-tech gloves supposed to enable hand gestures to create sounds.

Heap arrived 30 minutes late (a tetchy announcement blamed the audience’s phones rather than overrunning support acts) and admitted to being “unprepared” and not soundchecking properly. After an evening mostly spent faffing around on a laptop as technology crashed around her at every turn, she apologised for the whole debacle: “I thought we would be further along with the gloves. I need to practise, practise and practise”.

Xizi She Knows was ruined by a hailstorm of feedback (“lesson learned: I should definitely not have done that one”) and Entanglement by false starts. Worse still, the show was streamed (“I wish we had kept this between ourselves”) but there were straws too for a remarkably supportive audience to clutch.

The heavily pregnant Heap showed charming, witty grace under great pressure as she explained each song between apologies. Her considerable gifts peeped through on Hide & Seek and Goodnight & Go, while The Listening Chair provided limited vindication and succour, as Heap and the London Contemporary Voices went a cappella.

She returns to touring in May and promised “to get things right”: they can’t go as wrong as this.

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