The music video
The new single by Imogen Heap, You Know Where to Find Me, is the sixth song from her Heap Songs Project. It led to the creation, in collaboration with Artangel and Robur TV, of an illustrated, interactive map of Edinburgh that gives an insight into both her creative process and the city’s pianos.
In 2011, Grammy award winning musician Heap began working on her 4th solo album, a collection called Heap Songs – written and released individually two months apart, each with a unique story of its own.
In June 2012, this journey took her to A Room for London, a one-bedroom, boat-shaped installation that overlooks the Thames from the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall. First she installed a customised audiovisual egg-shaped ‘listening chair’ into the Southbank Centre below, to gather information from passers-by about what the river Thames meant to them. Then, having absorbed this material, she spent a night in the boat and began to write the latest Heap Song, You Know Where to Find Me.
Talking about You Know Where to Find Me, Heap says: “There are many different personalities in this song because people experience the river in different ways. A place for play, for rest and for some, to visit the ashes of their loved ones. The Thames has its dark sides too; in lives and love it’s taken.”
Having part of the lyrics and music intact, the next stage was to record piano parts. Heap turned to Edinburgh based, piano-owning Twitter followers to let her into their house, wear their clothes and record elements of the song. This was done in just one day in the city, involving 13 pianos, filming the music video as they went. Heap improvised and wrote the song on these pianos and finished it off at her studio in Essex.
Alongside this, an illustrated, interactive online map commissioned by Artangel and created with Robur TV for The Space, allows visitors to explore Heap’s journey through Edinburgh via the pianos she played, from her own recollections of the people she met and the places she visited, to interviews with the pianos’ owners describing what the instruments mean to them and the location in which they are found.
Heap continues to write and release her 4th studio instalment one track, one project, at a time. Five singles have been released so far including a crowd inspired track, the world’s first 3D-sound song and a project involving her musical gloves. The album Ellipse is due out in 2013.
To visit the You Know Where To Find me collection, which includes a photo gallery of the Edinburgh locations visited by Heap and her Room For London performance, go to this page.
A Room for London is a collaboration between Living Architecture and Artangel, in association with Southbank Centre and the London 2012 Festival. It was designed by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with the artist Fiona Banner. To hear them describe the project, click here.