Hide And Seek: A Deconstruction

Sat in the library at Carleton this afternoon and decided to have a closer listen to a song that May and Dan put me on to during their last visit. It’s by Imogen Heap and it’s called Hide and Seek.

So I listened to it a few times and then decided to put it on single-song repeat for a while to kind of figure it out. I listened to it for quite a while in the background as I reviewed data and made graphs. I checked the iTunes play count and it was 23 by the time I turned it off (93 minutes or so). So you could say that I extensively checked it out I guess.

Needless to say it is a very compelling track. Not exactly ‘cross-format focused for airplay success’ but something along the lines of what Negativland had in mind when they described a song that had been designed. I don’t know if Imogen Heap did design it, but that’s the effect I get. And I must say that I am not using ‘design’ in a pejorative sense at all. It’s a small miracle of craftsmanship.

The song itself is just over four minutes. And it’s almost impossible to pin down something that it is like. Not because it is totally unlike anything you’ve heard before, but because it is self-contradictory in so many ways. That, I believe, is one reason it is so fascinating.

The song is solo voice accompanied by rich vocorder harmonies. This makes it immediately reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave. After this point, though, we have to start into the contradictions if we want to discuss this song any more.

This is a real christmas tree kind of track. It is jammed full of tweaky effects, and is wildly inconsistent. One minute we have large concert hall reverb, the next the room is dead. There is exactly one industrial hammer sound in the 4 minutes. One minute we have bright (almost painful) treble-rich pop EQ, the next we have mid overload: muddy distorted vocorder. This inconsistency should make it really bad. It makes it really good.

The metre of the song is also contradictory. On a casual listen it seems to be what hymnodists would call ‘Particular Meter’. Meaning basically that the metre of the tune is custom-matched to the metre of the words; in other words it wouldn’t fit into the traditional scheme of having a book of tunes and a book of words and picking an appropriate pair. It also seems like it’s kind of ‘not in time’, very flowing, very expressive, and — while very rhythmic — totally irregular. That is how it sounds on a casual listen.

Now I have this thing that May and Dan will attest to that I hear songs in different metres than normal other people do. I thought perhaps it was just me when I began to hear the piece in 4… But I patiently counted out the whole track. It turns out that the casual listen I talked about in the last paragraph is wrong. The song of contraditions. The irregular metre is not the truth as the song is actually an extremely consistent 4/4 (roughly 120 bpm) from first beat to the rit at the end. It is heavily misbarred, which is another common quality of old american hymns. Misbarred songs have the metrical emphasis on the wrong beats. They are misleading because it sounds like you’re jamming a beat here and and stealing a beat there, but when you look at it closely they’re plain old 4/4 or whatever. Imogen’s singing is expressive for sure, and she pulls a couple of beats around, but that’s style. As Shelley once said, there’s writing and then there’s singing.

The thing is that even when you know it’s in 4, the song (particularly around the Hide and Seek part) just wants to be heard as expressive, free of metre, almost like the rhythmic but metreless cadenza in opera. Despite this and the relaxed performance, all the rests are counted. The production of the multiple vocorder tracks probably necessitated this.

Harmonically the track is sticking to its contradictory guns. We go from 2 voice wide open unschooled harmony to (I didn’t count) 4-5 voice crunchy close packed stuff that even gets jazzy. What kind of song is this anyway? No answers from the harmonic world… I almost want to write this song down to try to figure it out. (Unlikely to have time anytime soon though in case you were thinking of asking.)

Despite its massive harmonic structure for a pop song, it is begging for at least two more parts. I hear a deep bass (perhaps doubling some of her low notes), and there is definitely a descant super-high part in there. Actually she gives us 4 notes of the high part at one point, but I hear a lot more of it.

The thing is, if I put in all the things that I’m hearing in this track it would become a lumbering overstuffed mess. It seems to be precisely the things that are misssing that enable it to survive. The reason I said the song seemed ‘designed’ is that I find myself cued to “imagine in” these missing parts, and I think that’s another reason that it is so compelling.

In keeping with my “I never listen to the words” behaviours I haven’t commented on the poem, but it is clearly as varied as the tune. Each part of this song is over so fast — you kind of want it to keep going the way it was going for a few more verses. It’s almost as if there’s a whole album of music compressed into this one track if only you let your brain expand the verses of each section out… pretend you’re listening to five smoothly interconnected 30-second samples of songs and that’s kind of what this song does without sounding like it isn’t one song. So weird. So compelling.

The song can be had from the Interweb’s usual warez spots and the iTMS. But I think I’m going to buy this person’s album, just to see if this track was some kind of divine intervention or whether there’s more than four minutes of this kind of coolness.

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