Imogen Heap is always up to exciting new things, but let’s take a moment to celebrate 20 years ago. Her landmark Speak for Yourself turns 20, and it’s getting. a proper part with a vinyl release (at last), a remaster, and even the chance to listen to “Hide and Seek” in Spatial Audio on Apple Music. Good timing, too: the TikTok generation has made “Headlock” a surprise second smash from this album. Now the full record gets a second life.
History is a circle, not a line. That 20-year mark seems to mean music and technology reaches a new generation. And for those of us who did unpeel Speak for Yourself on CD (see below), we might just hear things in a new way.
Here’s Imogen in a party dress to set the mood:
Reissue details and stream
Here’s where to get it all:
Vinyl preorder: https://shop.imogenheap.com
“Hide and Seek” streaming: https://sfy20.com/hideandseekapple
The party on the Internet: tonight, July 18th at 6pm London time (noon NYC), Imogen is streaming a 20th celebration: Imogenheap.com
“Headlock” to “Hide and Seek”
Plenty of ink has already been spilled on the viral phenomenon that grew out of the video game Mouthwashing, “Headlock,” and TikTok, and spawned eventually animations, visualizers, dances, and more. It’s a bit like explaining a joke. Just get lost in a music video made of the character from the Hunter x Hunter manga:
Or listen to the Mouthwashing characters covering the song with some AI voices. (You know what’s next: humans covering the weird way the AI is weirdly covering the original song. That’s the cycle now.)
Let’s also celebrate like it’s 2005 with a very non-TikTok experience of music.
Yes, yes, vinyl and all that. But this will be instantly blood pressure lowering for the CD generation. (I’m not a big one for nostalgia, but it is weird to watch this and have flashbacks to this very album.)
The creation of “Hide and Seek” is now the stuff of legends. It’s funny to hear younger artists messing around with vocal processors to get the same result, sometimes now possibly unaware of the influence this track had on the whole technique. Here’s Imogen recounting the story–one of the few times that a broken computer was a good thing for the creative process. It might be a good reminder for how to turn around your mood in general. We all have days like that and they don’t naturally lend themselves to feeling inspired without some intervention!
In the midst of all the chatter about music tech, sometimes I think Imogen is really underrated as a songwriter and performer. Just check this terrific Tiny Desk Concert from a few years back:
Streaming and Spatial
Most importantly: the release is in Apple Lossless! So go check the remaster.
Now, about that Spatial Audio rendition–like a lot of folks, I have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s spatialized headphones implementation. Spatial Audio is also not lossless (unless you direct monitor via USB-C on the new AirPods Max). But don’t dismiss it out-of-hand: Apple’s tech can work really well, and it’s dependent on source material and how much effort the mixing engineer put into the task. I think it’s best to think of this as a very specific binaural implementation, combining Apple’s excellent on-device head tracking and Apple’s particular mix of Dolby and Apple encoding and decoding. The advantage for engineers is that you can test on the target devices, and now Apple has added fairly decent self-calibration tools so listeners get better results.
Here’s my advice: first, just listen to the “Hide and Seek” stereo remaster in lossless, as it already sounds really terrific. (And it’s just a pleasure to hear it again.) The honest truth is that stereo mixing is a pretty good way of creating a sense of space in headphones, and Apple’s headphones have a pretty nice stereo stage in stereo mode. But it’s worth listening to the Spatial Audio version and seeing if you like it, at least as an experiment. Now, normally I’d say turn head tracking on for Spatial Audio, as the perception of space works best when you move your head. But “Hide and Seek” is really tightly spatialized, so it feels weird to have the audio objects “sticking to your face” as you move around. I’d suggest setting head tracking to fixed and then listening with Spatial Audio. I mean, the worst that happens is, you hear “Hide and Seek” again.
(*Imogen calls this “Dolby Atmos,” though then we get into the weeds with Apple nomenclature and renderers. That will mean Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos through supported loudspeaker setups, or simply Spatial Audio on Apple headphones. See this excellent explanation of how Dolby Atmos and Apple Spatial Audio differ, even though Spatial Audio is derived from Atmos. And If you’re not sold on this particular track being spatialized, go check Kraftwerk 3-D, which exploits Spatial Audio headphone listening well.)
We should catch up with Imogen on her new work, too. As a teaser, here’s her talking about motherhood and sexuality and health all the things that we don’t really talk about.
So for one of the artists most associated with music technology, it’s appropriate that Imogen’s work is so thoroughly human. And for a lot of us, that’s what the tech is about. About vulnerability.
Happy 20th, Speak for Yourself, and here’s to being ourselves here and now.
“Here and now is all we have.”