Laurie Anderson - The multimedia superartist

All too often the phrase "multimedia artist" gets thrown around carelessly, but if there's one person who can genuinely lay claim to the title, it's Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson. Over the course of her career, she has taken on countless roles: visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, director, ventriloquist, electronics wizard, backing vocalist, instrumentalist. And she has always managed to combine electronic experimentation with a language accessible to a wide audience.

Her work brings together two strands linking art and music. On one hand, there's the influence of performance art (from the pioneering John Cage to the Fluxus group), with its blending of the artist's body - the protagonist of the action that constitutes the work - and the technological medium of video, which preserves its memory. On the other, there's the electronic avant-garde which, through Varèse and Stockhausen, also found its way into books on contemporary art. Add to that a thoroughly New York inclination toward urban poetry, which would lead her to collaborate with figures like William Burroughs and Robert Wilson, and which would also be part of her artistic and romantic relationship with Lou Reed.

What sets Anderson apart from so many musicians who have dabbled in art is the fact that, for her, the two aspects are inseparable, each existing because of the other.

Trained in one of the many avant-garde schools of 1970s New York, Laurie Anderson began her career as a "global" artist with bizarre performances that reworked the forms of minimal music in an original way. This gave rise to bold projects such as "Automotive" (a concert for cars from 1972), "Duets on Ice" (staged in New York in 1974), "Songs and Stories for the Insomniac" (presented at Artists Space in New York and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1975), and "The Handphone Table" (a sound and visual installation created at Projects Gallery in New York in 1978).

During those years, Anderson grew close to several avant-garde musicians who would later prove decisive to her artistic growth, from Philip Glass to Brian Eno, from John Cage to her future husband Lou Reed. But while music remained her starting point, her horizons were always open. The New York artist even found time to play straight man to comedian Andy Kaufman in various "comedy clubs" in Coney Island.

Her first major work in the musical field arrived in 1980 with United States. A true cornerstone of contemporary performance art, it is a monumental project (nearly five hours of music) in which Anderson lets loose, staging an ideal avant-garde theatrical work that draws on the genius of John Cage and Meredith Monk (listen to "Walk The Dog") while enriching the form with a sharper political awareness, filtered through sketches that are at turns biting, humorous and bleak. Laurie Anderson's is an almost Huxleyan vision of Western reality, made up of anthropomorphized robots and automaton-men, latent alienation and unease. In short, Laurie Anderson's art had already found its most mature and fully realized expression.

But it was in the two years that followed, with the single "O Superman" and the album Big Science (1982), that Laurie Anderson truly broke through onto the international stage, winning over both critics and the public. The credit goes to her universal language, made up of spectacular flourishes - such as the onstage use of a digital violin - and a relentless exploration of vocality. Her voice, in fact, is constantly transforming: filtered through a vocoder, disguised by countless effects, unsettling one moment, simple and angelic the next, it is her instrument par excellence. The supreme showcase of this art is "O Superman", the track that sealed her international breakthrough: the robotic vocal loop (Ah - Ah - Ah - Ah), corresponding to two chords, sustains the entire piece, forming both its obsession and its main melodic "hook". The unsettling use of technology in her performances - for instance, through the use of answering-machine voices ("Hi I'm not home right now...") - also comes through in the alienating use of the vocoder filter on her voice, and more generally in the cold spoken-word delivery that largely makes up Anderson's "singing". At once sinister and playful, cold and evocative, the track serves as the blueprint for the rest of the album, revealing both its playful, ironic side and its unsettling one, with the Country portrayed as a great mother figure - at once protective, suffocating and commanding.

Similarly, the opening "From The Air" shows off a sharp rock-pop edge with its interplay of drums and sax, but it also delivers a chilling introduction when Anderson's diabolical spoken delivery is underscored by the fatalism of the synths. The title track, on the other hand, is the most solemn and electronic piece on the album, carried by synths and sparse percussion, with the voice taking on a medieval, chant-like quality. While "Sweaters" is a playful joke built on disorienting bagpipes, "Walking & Falling" shows just how Anderson can build dramatic tension using only a handful of sounds paired with her spoken delivery.

The marimba that opens "Born, Never Asked" recalls the contemporary albums of Peter Gabriel, with whom Anderson would later collaborate (on "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)", from "So"). Next come the madcap vocalizations of "Example #22", marked by the richest and most eccentric instrumentation on the album (violin, flute, tenor and baritone sax, clarinets, accordion). Equally playful is "Let X=X", which introduces a new discourse set against solemn keyboards, marimba and hand claps, before derailing into chaos with a runaway trombone. The closing track, "It Tango", continues directly from the previous one, forming a single piece with it, and revisits the dialogue structure between two characters (both voiced by the artist, who has described herself as a "wearer of voices"), which this time sinks into nonsense, culminating in the sheer incommunicability of its final riddle.

Big Science is the first of seven albums recorded for Warner Bros, among them Mister Heartbreak (perhaps her most “pop” record), United States Live, Strange Angels and Home Of The Brave, soundtrack to the film of the same name, boasting an irresistibly “contagious” track like “Language Is A Virus”.

But Laurie Anderson is, above all, a born performer. In 1986, she presents her performance piece “Natural History”, from which, five years later, she will draw the book “Empty Places”. Other projects follow, such as “Stories from the Nerve Bible” (1993), “Bill and Laurie” and “About Five Rounds” (1996).

In 1995, the New York singer-songwriter embarks on the long world tour “The Nerve Bible”, her first major multimedia performance in five years. At the same time, she releases the album Bright Red, co-produced with Brian Eno, and her first CD-ROM, Puppet Motel. “When I made my first CD-ROM,” she recalls, “I began to think: ‘Here’s a medium that brings together images, sound and electronics, and I can mix them all together’. It’s a kind of digital art-making that matches the way my mind works, because it lets things interact with each other. It’s a circular medium, made up of points that touch along the way. I’ve always loved the journey. And if it’s interesting enough, I don’t set myself any limits.”

Over the years, Laurie Anderson has also made various videos and films, and composed soundtracks for films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, and for ballets by Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley and others. She has also written pieces for National Public Radio, the BBC and the Seville Expo, as well as several orchestral works. But her career can also be read as a journey backwards: from the use of technology to the rediscovery of “traditional” instruments. And written texts, such as Melville’s “Moby Dick”, can become, in her artistic vision, the starting point for further explorations, for multimedia shows like “Songs From Moby Dick”, in which the New York artist also revealed herself as a painter.

In 2001, then, came Life On A String, initially conceived as a studio side-project for the theatrical production “Songs and Stories of Moby Dick”. “I’m truly in love with Melville,” the American composer has said, “but once the show was over I couldn’t stand those smelly old sailors anymore. I wanted to come back to my own century and make a record that was an account of my experiences and my life.” And that’s how the twelve tracks of this album came about, co-produced with Hal Willner, who had already worked alongside Marianne Faithfull and Lou Reed. Around him, a sizeable cast of collaborators: from Bill Frisell’s guitar (“Washington Street”) to Van Dyke Parks’s orchestration (“Dark Angel”), as well as Vinicius Cantuaria’s percussion (“Life On A String”) and Joey Baron’s drumming (“Slip Away”).

Percussion in particular is at the heart of Laurie Anderson’s most recent research: “Right now, I feel a strong need for physicality in music,” she has explained. “To play something that isn’t just about ‘typing’. Sometimes the sound of hands on wood is enough. At the same time, I’m perfecting a particular instrument, the talking stick, a kind of turntable that can modulate the voice along melodic lines that can only be heard from one exact spot. It’s like a forced path: if you move, you lose the melody’s frequency, and all you can hear is noise.”

One of the American artist’s most curious performances was putting on a cashier’s uniform and serving customers at a New York McDonald’s, “to live inside globalization and find out what it means to be part of this mass process”. And on the relationship between musicians and machines, she offers an unsettling theory: “We musicians who have developed the possibilities of technological progress are, in a way, cyborgs. Sometimes, when you work with machines, you identify with them to the point that you start talking to them. Think of David Bowie – the way he speaks is like a machine. Same with David Byrne.” In 2003 Laurie Anderson also became NASA’s first official artist.

Nine years of recording silence go by, until in 2010 it’s time for Homeland, which marks, after many years, a return to the song format.

Laurie Anderson’s eye once again focuses on the socio-political rot of the West, this time taking aim at the financial and cultural system promoted by her beloved and detested America, with urgent, immediate songs that nonetheless never forget the arty roots of their maker. These are mostly minimalist ballads for voice and violin, tinged with unease and melancholy, with Manhattan’s “lonely crowd” parading in the background. From the splendid opener “Transitory Life” to the mournful “Strange Perfume” (featuring a cameo from Antony Hegarty), from the anthemic techno march of “Only An Expert” (a bitter invective against bankers and speculators) to the electronic ballad “Bodies In Motion”, right up to finally glimpsing the light in the bucolic abstractions of the final three tracks, an ideal emergency exit from the American nightmare.

In 2012 Anderson suffered considerable damage because of Hurricane Sandy, which struck the American East Coast and several nearby islands. A violent, unexpected event broke into her home in New York’s West Village and, as a result, into her compositional process, becoming the central theme of a cycle of pieces already in the works with the Kronos Quartet, completed two years later.

The release of Landfall (2018) on Nonesuch coincides with the publication of an artistic autobiography titled “All The Things I Lost In The Flood”: a collection of essays about Anderson’s long career that nonetheless end up underscoring, as a kind of memento, the essentially fleeting nature shared by life and art. But what the godmother of American experimentation lost in that tragic circumstance does nothing to dim the gratitude and passion that continue to fuel her inspiration, capable of transfiguring even the most painful events into complex, multifaceted works.

This remarkable strength of spirit also shows itself in Landfall, which, even as its thirty movements mostly alternate between grey, mournful moods, nonetheless conveys the resolve that only a wound already healed and placed in perspective can grant. It’s a fully realized, briskly evolving score, even though essentially built on an emotional narrative framework: fertile ground for the world’s most famous string quartet, also thanks to the breadth of composers and genres it has tackled over forty-five years. With this work Laurie Anderson leaves all bitterness behind: grief gives way to a serene acceptance of everything that, by nature, must come to pass and run its course. A fatalism that ends up resembling an act of faith.

More recently, Anderson has opened her largest solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in D.C., titled ‘The Weather’, on view until July 2022. ‘The Weather’ is a collection of about a dozen new artworks representing her fifty-year career. The exhibition guides visitors through an immersive audiovisual experience, showing the artist’s creative storytelling process across video, performance, installation, painting and other media.

Laurie Anderson’s arrival on the rock scene established an all-round artistic figure with few equals, one who entirely redefines the role of women in music. It’s no coincidence that the biggest names in rock’s intelligentsia have engaged with her work, above all Brian Eno, surely the figure closest to her in spirit, with whom she made “Bright Red” in 1994.

Beyond her records, her career has been marked by countless projects spanning spoken poetry, performance, installations, collaborations on ballets, theatre pieces and film scores, while the period of her early work, up to "United States", is chronicled in the book "Stories from the Nerve Bible. A Twenty-year retrospective".

For several years Laurie Anderson’s name turns up in various projects shared with other musicians from the avant-garde scene, and only in 2024 does the artist finally return with a fully realized work of her own. 

Amelia is a project with a pronounced cinematic/literary/musical language, an album that finds its roots in a performance Laurie Anderson first staged twenty-five years ago. Arriving after numerous revisions and expansions, the album tells the story of the first woman, Amelia Earhart, who in 1937 attempted to circumnavigate the Earth in her Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft, only to disappear over the Pacific Ocean after some 22,000 miles of flight.

The orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, the Filharmonie Brno string trio, and Laurie Anderson's own viola provide just the right dramatic tension, leaving room for a handful of instrumental contributions (Marc Ribot, Kenny Wollesen and Tony Scherr), a few field recordings, and a collaboration with Anohni, giving them the narrative weight and space they need. The winning artistic insight lies in the singular synergy between the figure of Amelia Earhart and Laurie Anderson herself. Amelia is made up of 22 segments, seemingly uniform, built on string arrangements, drone music, electronic and analog textures, and the constant drone of an airplane engine — an album that demands careful listening and familiarity with the lyrics to be fully appreciated. Even the narrative correspondence between the music and the various locations isn't immediately obvious, but after repeated listens the connection between the territories and their instrumental settings becomes clearer. The sharper string sound and heavier drums of "Waves Of Sand" evoke the Arabian desert, the tremulous harmonies of "San Juan" conjure the tangled nature of rainforests, and the dreamlike melody of "India And On Down To Australia" underscores one of the most evocative stretches of the journey. The curious quote from "Happy Birthday" by Altered Images inside "Road To Mandalay", and the chaotic atmosphere of "Fly Into The Sun", confirm the almost obsessive attention to detail, which allows the album to be appreciated even without visual accompaniment, renewing all the magic of that fusion between different disciplines that has always defined Laurie Anderson's artistic output.

Eclectic, curious, enterprising: Laurie Anderson will never stop searching for new forms of expression because, as she sang in a song from almost twenty years ago, "language is a virus from outer space".

Contributions by Roberto Rizzo ("United States" and "Homeland") and Michele Palozzo ("Landfall"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Amelia")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google