Like that time my crush decided it would be better if we stayed friends after spending the night kissing on her backyard trampoline inside the gated community. Burdened with the anvil that is low-stakes, serialized teen fiction, the song quickly transforms into a hymn, one where I can repeat the first few lines when life gets first-world, suburban tough. In that moment, and for several subsequent moments, I begin to associate feelings with Heap’s keyboard-controlled, digitally harmonized vibrato.
Imogen heap hide and seek full#
Y’know, the sort of spectacle that pulls at the heartstrings of affluent suburban teens who want to believe their lives are also full of exotic soap opera melodrama.īut it’s that gunshot that lingers - punctuated by Heap’s computer-assisted vocals, her voice the acoustic incarnation of a teen, drowning in emotion. The scene itself is standard daytime stuff: The show’s blond protagonist is about to be killed by his brother until his on-again-off-again girlfriend shows up to the motel where the two brothers are brawling, just in time to shoot her boyfriend’s brother in the back before he can smash her boyfriend’s face with a rotary phone. , handed an essential moment in the teen drama television oeuvre. Millennials everywhere, but especially privileged suburban teens like myself are, thanks to the creators of The O.C. I’m in the depths of the doldrums of adolescence, misanthropy and the sort of unrequited high school love that feels like it could be happily ever after, if only she notices me.
Like someone trying to remember a quote they might eventually tattoo on their inner bicep and then later regret, I mouth the lyrics back: “Where are we? What the hell is going on?”
Then Imogen Heap ’s “Hide and Seek” pours into my ears through my headphones: “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I can’t remember which abyss, I just know it’s deep and I’m staring, peering, forcing myself to feel everything by way of not actually feeling anything. I like the original where the grain of her voice dictates the focus more than the actual text.It’s 2005. Choral arrangements keep this harmonic power – some seem to smooth out the dissonance – and make the words too clear for me. Regardless of the ensemble I believe the harmonic content is what makes this song so effective – and it is that suspended resolution of the dissonance of the second phrase that is what clinches it for me. Hearing a female/male voice choir somehow lacks the ‘grain’.Ī single sex chorus can get closer to the intentions of the original I think – such a performance I felt retained something of that ‘grain’ that makes the song so compelling. What is immediately heard in such choral arrangements is a lack of that timbre that I think creates the beauty of the original – that singular voice multi-tracked and subject to electronic manipulation.
This seems fitting as the original is very much an essay in vocal timbre – albeit manipulated electronically. The music remains incredibly innocent and subtle enough to make the text the focus, and equally striking is the use of dynamic contrast – something often lacking in the normalized recordings often heard.Ī bit of YoiTube searching revealed quite a few choral versions of the song. All sounds rather straightforward – yet this music fits the text so well. Harmonically it uses primary triads coloured with extensions. Perhaps it is the concentration on the voice it sounds as if it is a cappella yet there is a synthesised sound played homorhythmically with the voice. There is something disturbingly beautiful about this song.
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