Imo-genius

Near the end of her gig at a sold-out Warfield Theater in San Francisco on Sunday night, headlining singer-composer-keyboardist-electrowhiz Imogen Heaps told the adoring throng that she’s on the verge of leaving the road to record a new album. (The response: Cheers, applause, regrets, etc.) She ended the set as she said she usually does: a solo voice-and-keyboard rendition of the wry love song “Goodnight and Go” from her most recent album “Speak for Yourself.”It was a lovely finish to a lovely show, made all the more charming by its imperfections and Imogen’s idiosyncrasies. Tarted up like a Wild West saloon girl or Victorian streetwalker, she wandered the stage and chatted informally with the crowd whenever she wasn’t fussing with her equipment or putting her all into a tune. I like to think of her as the metaphorical love child of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, especially if Laurie Anderson had been her nanny and Sinead O’Connor had been her voice teacher.Immi’s career, which began in her native England as a solo thing in 1998, got a boost when she teamed with producer Guy Sigsworth as Frou Frou in 2002 and recorded a superb album highlighted by the delirious techno-pop reverie “Let Go” (familiar from the soundtrack to the film “Garden State”). She did pay homage to Frou Frou by doing an exquisite “Let Go,” slowed to a more introspective-ballad pace. The bulk of the concert was made up of numbers from 2005's “Speak for Yourself,” including an entrancing version of “Just for Now” that she built on stage by looping live vocal samples one on top of another, and a dreamy, electronically-treated a capella “Hide and Seek.”The cover to the single "Headlock," from Imogen Heap's album Speak for Yourself.She may be getting a little weary after months of touring, and she was definitely illin’ a bit (she needed tissues and tea throughout her set to deal with the drip and throat strain from a cold), but damn! She pushed her normally soaring pipes as far as they could go, kept her good humor, and offered the audience an insider’s view of the technical aspects of her performance (showing off the sequencers, her sound-sampling “parrots,” and the various keyboards and voice treatments she uses). More to the point, she hit her marks, hit the notes, and meshed with her unconventional band which includes a bassist/French horn player, a drummer, a guitarist, and human beat-box Kid Beyond (who opened for her with an eclectic solo-plus-machine set of politically-conscious techno-industrial rap).Witty, baroque, ephemeral, romantic, sonorous, virtuosic. Imogen was all of that - and a bag of (computer) chips.