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Laurie Anderson

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Laurie Anderson on the cover of her album Strange Angels. Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson, on June 5, 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) is an American experimental performance artist and musician.

Life and works

Anderson was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She attended Mills College in California, and eventually graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University.

She performed in New York through the 1970s. Two early pieces, "New York Social Life" and "Time to Go," were included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others.

She became more widely known in 1982 with the single "O Superman," originally released in a limited quantity by One Ten Records; a sudden influx of orders from the UK (prompted by British DJ John Peel playing the record) led to Anderson signing with the Warner Bros. label, which re-released the single. "O Superman" reached number two on the national pop charts in Britain.

"O Superman" was part of a larger stage work entitled United States and was included on her following album, Big Science. Her more recent stage work includes a multimedia presentation inspired by Moby Dick. She starred in and directed the 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave, and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. All of Anderson's albums from the 1980s sold very well despite being labeled "avant garde". Her varied career has even included voice-acting in the animated film The Rugrats Movie. In 1994 she created a CD-ROM entitled Puppet Motel.

She wrote a supplemental article on the cultural character of New York City for the Encyclopædia Britannica[1] and in the late 1980s hosted the PBS series, Alive from Off Center, for which she produced the short film, What You Mean We?.

One of the central themes in Anderson's work is exploring the effects of technology on human interrelationships and communication.

Anderson has collaborated with William Burroughs, Mitchell Froom, Arto Lindsay, Ian Ritchie, Peter Gabriel, Perry Hoberman, David Sylvian, Jean Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, Nona Hendryx, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Stewart and long-term partner Lou Reed. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s (with a romantic involvement hinted at in some of her spoken word performances about him).

Anderson, who rarely revisits older work (though themes and lyrics occasionally reappear) went on tour performing a selection of her best-known musical pieces in 2001. One of these performances was recorded in New York City only a week after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and included a performance of "O Superman". This concert was released in early 2002 as the double CD, Live in New York, which remains her most recent album release.

In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first and so far only artist-in-residence, which inspired her most recent performance piece, The End of the Moon.

Rumors emerged of a possible new album release in the fall of 2004, but this turned out to be false as Anderson seems too busy mounting a succession of themed shows, as well as composing a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan.

Discography

(with U.S. chart positions)

Albums

Singles

  • "O Superman (For Massenet)" (1981) #2 UK
  • "Big Science" (1981)
  • "Sharkey's Day" (1984)
  • "Language is a Virus" (1986)
  • "Strange Angels" (1989)
  • "Babydoll" (1989) #7 US Modern Rock
  • "In Our Sleep" (1994)

Anderson also recorded a number of limited-release singles in the late 1970s (many issued from the Holly Soloman Gallery), songs from which were included on a number of compilations, including Giorno Poetry Systems' The Nova Convention and You're the Guy I Want to Spend My Money With. Over the years she has also performed on recordings by other musicians such as Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Jean-Michel Jarre. She also contributed lyrics to the Philip Glass album Songs for Liquid Days, portrayed Mary Todd Lincoln (wife of Abraham Lincoln) for a recording of an opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, and also contributed a spoken word piece to a tribute album in honor of John Cage.

Music videos

Formal music videos have been produced of:

  • "O Superman"
  • "Sharkey's Day"
  • "Language is a Virus" (from Home of the Brave)
  • "Beautiful Red Dress"

In addition, in lieu of making another music video for her Strange Angels album, Anderson taped a series of 1-2 minute "Personal Service Announcements" in which she spoke about issues such as the U.S. national debt and the arts scene. Some of the music used in these productions came from her soundtrack to Swimming to Cambodia.

Video release

Inventions

Anderson has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performances.

Tape-bow violin

The tape-bow violin is an instrument created by Laurie Anderson in 1977. It uses recorded magnetic tape in place of the traditional hair in the bow, and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Anderson has updated and modified this device over the years. She can be seen using the tape-bow violin in her film, Home of the Brave, during the "Late Show" segment in which she manipulates a sentence recorded by William S. Burroughs.

Talking stick

The talking stick is a six-foot long, batonlike MIDI controller. It was used in the Moby Dick tour in 1999-2000. She described it in program notes:

The Talking Stick is a new instrument that I designed in collaboration with a team from Interval Research and Bob Bielecki. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It works on the principle of granular synthesis. This is the technique of breaking sound into tiny segments, called grains, and then playing them back in different ways. The computer rearranges the sound fragments into continuous strings or random clusters which are played back in overlapping sequences to create new textures. The grains are very short, a few hundredths of a second. Granular synthesis can sound smooth or choppy depending on the size of the grain and the rate at which they’re played. The grains are like film frames. If you slow them down enough you begin to hear them separately.

Notes

  1. ^ "Encyclopaedia Anderson", The New Yorker, July 16 2001
Wikiquote has quotations related to Laurie Anderson.

Listening

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