Imogen Heap, an award winning, musician, recently spent six weeks in Hangzhou in China.    She made this beautiful video  http://www.youtube.com/embed/jgvAx2Bdt-o.

The song will form part of her next album.  It’s interesting to see how an artist sees, and hears, a different city; which images and impressions make it to the finished product.

In the Guardian she explains:

Well, I’ve just come back from six weeks in Hangzhou in China. The British Council and the PRS for Music Foundation helped fund the trip – I had to put in an application – but it ended up being much more expensive than planned. Before I went I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I’d heard that people practise qigong by the lake, and that there’s a famous temple bell that’s rung at sunset every evening, so I was thinking about finding a rhythm in the chaos of this huge city and a journey through it in the course of a day.

I ended up curating this 24-hour period. It was my birthday as well.  I wanted to combine the sorts of things that happen there every day with different media and art forms. We filmed the whole thing and then I drew on all the sounds for my latest Heapsong.  So we filmed the fishermen out on the lake at midnight, but it’s kind of illegal to do that, so we had them fishing out a treasure map. And there are a lot of skateboarders there, so we filmed them at 1am, surrounded by a ring of taxi drivers shining their lights on them.

We went into a primary school class, where the children were doing their eye exercises, and the teacher giving them their instructions gave us our tempo. The sound of the newspaper printing presses – that became the beat. And we caught this woman who heads up this huge hill to a temple every day at sunrise and screams at the top of her lungs, so the sound of that is now in the middle section of the song.