Meeting Imogen Heap (again!) 8 years since our performance
Exactly 8 years ago, I had the honour of meeting and performing with my idol, Imogen Heap. (It’s a long story, but the short version is that I had sent her a video audition to perform with her and she agreed! You can read that blog post here). Most recently, I got to meet her in person again! How crazy is that?
During the recent Amsterdam Dance Event, the DigitalOcean Amsterdam group organised a Meetup event and Imogen Heap was one of the two invited speakers! I was asked by my friend ex-digital-marketing-manager-turned-junior-developer Valerie to come! DigitalOcean is a network of software developers, so even though I didn’t really have much to contribute, I was lucky that the theme of the evening was music!
The first speaker was Piet van Dongen (from Luminis) and he showed off a very funny project The Internet of Drums, where you could program a drum beat on this webpage that would trigger a small drum machine, so the audience was busy sending musical and some non-musical beats from their phone.
After the break, Imogen Heap came to present her latest project Mycelia, and The Creative Passport. Mycelia (in my understanding haha!) comes from the problem that artists spend too much time and money submitting data to countless organisations, especially royalty collecting organisations and streaming services, which get outdated and are full of errors or even not made public, so the idea is to start an open-source database based on blockchain technology, where artists can populate their own data even down to gear used, inspiration, artwork credits, lyrics, and special thanks, and artists in the network can connect and verify each other, and these organisations then have a credible destination to source the data, which is always going to be updated and correct because there is only ever one version of it.
So if you’re a musician, and want to own your data, sign up to Mycelia (link below) and be one of the first to be part of the beta testing.
After the talk, I joined my friend and another of her colleague’s to talk to Imogen. Funny, that after 8 years, I was still as starstruck as before! Nothing much changes. My friend told her that I performed with her and she was so sweet, because then she gave me a hug even though she didn’t quite remember me. At first she said my face was familiar but couldn’t really pick from where. Then she said I performed the cello with her and she said it was on the song Aha!, but then I reminded her about performing her song Earth with her with a cello and a loop machine to a sold-out Melkweg. It was very cute, because after that when she was talking to some more people, she was promoting me and telling them the story of when we had performed together 8 years ago and I played the cello with a loop machine.
It was very cool to talk to her about her new project. I told her that I was always so impressed by her innovations and how she’s always up to something. I offered to assist or support in any way possible and then the idea of having a Creative Passport party in Europe was born and she said that after the beta is launched, she would get in contact.
So maybe we will actually meet again, and sooner than 8 years!
More Information:
DigitalOcean Amsterdam meetup - https://www.meetup.com/DigitalOceanAmsterdam/
Imogen Heap Official Website - http://www.imogenheap.com/
Mycelia Official Website - http://myceliaformusic.org/
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