Oren turned me on to a lovely song over the weekend, Joseph Bates's taut, spare arrangement of Imogen Heap's eccentric, electro-spacey "Hide and Seek." The complete track plays automatically if you go to the Myspace page of Bates' group, Transit.
If you like it, you can download it if you go to "Download Hide & Seek! (view more)" under "Upcoming Shows." That leads you to a blog with a URL to the A-Cappella.com downloads page which you then have to sign up for. By the time payment is made and the various email exchanges carried out, the download opens in a browser window...we Mac people don't think in terms of "right clicking" but even I was able to figure out how to isolate the file and finally copy it into iTunes. I'm not saying all this was difficult, particularly, but...lots of steps.
The Transit version is a beautiful piece and well worth hearing at the Myspace page, at least.
Imogen Heap with Guy Sigsworth
_________________
Mike (But don't thank me, thank O.G.)
It seems that this song is actually a bit of an a cappella staple now. I think the version by UCLA's Awaken Acappella (also on myspace - awakenacappella) is rather better.
Neither are quite as great as the original, though.
Posted by: Michael Houghton | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 08:51 AM
OK, maybe this aint legal or ethical, but if you play the song from Myspace, it gets downloaded to your hard disk as a temporary file. Just save it and you're done.
Posted by: Peter Robinson | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 09:53 AM
Thanks for turning us on to that. Whew! Beautiful!
Posted by: Michael | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 10:05 AM
Lovely, thanks for posting this Mike.
I also listened to the original and the UCLA version mentioned above. I think I like Transit's version the most, it sounds just a tiny bit more refined to my ears.
Matthew
Posted by: Matthew Allen | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 02:47 PM
Mike---the Imogen Heap version is available on a compilation on emusic.com called "The Art of Chill 2".
Yours in c60ness....BB
Posted by: Bob6061 | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 04:15 PM
The original is a bit too much like Laurie Anderson but still somewhat better than Transit. (myspace.com/imogenheap)
But I do I find this one okay.
Anyway, the atmosphere of this song reminds me of Gabriela Robin's _Green Bird_ from the Cowboy Bebop anime series. Yoko Kano rules. :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsugYDVsUIY
(It's wrongly named Green Bird_s_.)
OT OT: Cowboy Bebop is one of the better SF series I've seen, although not as good as -also anime - Ghost in the Shell, second season. That one beats the pants off oodles of real-actor SF stuff.
Posted by: erlik | Tuesday, 08 January 2008 at 04:35 PM
This doesn't sound like pure a cappella singing to me.
Rather, I think there is harmonic augmentation using vocalizer synthesis - voices lowered by, say, an octave and added to the mix, and a vocoder (sic?) kind of modulation.
Then again, my sound card and speakers are definitely not up to Mike's specs! :D
Posted by: Gingerbaker | Wednesday, 09 January 2008 at 08:27 AM