Laurie Anderson - Big Science - C or D

You guys are making a strong case for me to relisten to it. Since I don't own Home of the Brave, I gotta say that BS is my least favoritie eighties Anderson: lots of good ideas, fascinating synth textures, and such, but the music and spoken-word stuff rarely interfaces meaningfully. Like I said upthread, Strange Angels is her real masterwork.

Oh man, I love this record. It's be nice if Laurie got all trendy or something.

It's hard. It's just hard. It's just kinda hard to say.

But isn't it?

This record was a car staple of ours when I was 8 or 9. 'From The Air' and a couple of others are ingrained.

Let X=X

Thanks for puttin' on the feed bag

(p.s. the last 20 seconds of 'Let X=X' are phenomenal)

OMG XPOST

let xpost = xpost

I'm kind of frightened of hearing these songs in the United States context in case it changes them. I think I would like to be listening to "It Tango" when I die.

The dodgy youtube clip of let x=x live is brilliant. The acoustics/dodgy mobile phone recording give it this really nice warmth.

my friend Jon went to a Laurie Anderson show a few years back and left halfway through -- apparently after he left, she played "O Superman" and people clapped along(!?)

HOW DO YOU PEOPLE KNOW I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT LAURIE ANDERSON THESE DAYS?

just bought it. xcited if trepidatious. she's always here where i work at our Galas and stuff, with lou reed. i wanna slip her a demo.

o superman is good but a little lazy, no?

Not really? I dunno: watch the video, and it feels like it's in the perfect spot, every element given just the right amount of weight and space.

i like the sparseness OK, but i could have done with a little more texture. also, the mother's voice is a cheap effect. not sure what it's supposed to mean, or why the effect wasn't more nuanced...

i've seen the video and loved it

I have a lot of love for this, i think it's crappiness adds to it (i mean the clip quality)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_VA3wuNNo0

Laurie is a one of the Golden Greats.

well i'm super psyched to check this album out

Wait, I'm not sure what you mean about the mother's voice -- the way she lapses a little further into Chicago-suburbs accent? (That's actually one of my favorite things about this, the really subtle Mom-ism of it!)

no no, just the way -- okay to put it literally, i feel like i clicked "Orion Voices" in GarageBand. it's just a cheap chorus/alien effect. coulda been more sutble?

the accent tho IS subtle, u r right. i like that.

Ha, okay, I have zero idea what you're talking about, I guess -- I don't recall any additional effect beyond the vocoder.

I love love love vocoders, I will like pretty much anything that uses a vocoder just for the vocoders. I love how the vocoder comes in slowly on the "dear amigo, dear partner" line

i barely know what i'm talking about either but every time i hear it, it just sounds like a little weird-for weird's-sake-to-me, in a lazy way.

someone at our radio station once got a request for "O Superman" so they just went on the air and started going "ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha"

i mean i love them too but sometimes i find them gratuitous.

i don't know, more listens will prolly change mind. i do very much enjoy listening to it.

haha @ ha ha ha

Best use of a bagpipe in pop ever.

I was so amazed when I first heard O Superman, I was told I would love it, I didn't really know what to expect. I love it.

oohhhh i dunno man Kate Bush has pipes kinda cornered no? tho i'm not exactly clear on pipe distinctions

Sweaters.

I love the backwards voices on Example (why can't I ever find the hash key on mac keyboards?)22

To be perfectly honest I only know Hounds Of Love, and I love Running Up That Hill so much I usually end up putting it on repeat and never actually getting to the rest of the album.

ooooh boy you have some to LEARN buddy

I'm normally not the biggest fan of minimalism or sparseness, but O Superman is a masterpiece. It's in the little details. Any minimalism that I love, really, still has great attention to detail (and a perverse sense of theatre).

putting it on

!!!

xpost to IKR

I know, I know...

no, you don't.

ya just don't.

=P go get the dreaming NOW.

ok listening. i still think whatever effect she's using on her voice in this is overdone. it's not as effective when it's used in the whole song, IMO.

Okay, but it's not an effect! It's a vocoder! Without it there would be about 98% less harmonic content (up until the counterpoint at the end, I guess)

yea but the vocoder produces an effect.

whatever you wanna call it -- the stuff happening on her voice, whether you wanna say vocoder or effect, is overdone. the harmonic becomes less interesting if it's used on nearly every phrase in the piece.

i usually feel that strong harmonic content like that is most effective when you build up to it a bit.

in this case it makes the piece a little too silly for me.

Vocoder is an instrument more than an effect. I mean, I'm not arguing with your opinion here (that's fine), but you should be clear on what a vocoder does: it's taking the envelope of her voice and using it to shape chords played on a keyboard. There's no separate voice/keyboard tracks here -- just one "instrument" playing. Do it without the vocoder, and all the melodic/harmonic stuff pretty much disappears from the bulk of the song: it'd just be "ha ha ha ha" and Laurie Anderson, like, talking! So it's not some kind of vocal "effect" in an otherwise complete song; the whole thing is built on one "instrument," the vocoder line.

ok, thanks for clarification.

i think this is the problem, really -- that the whole thing is built on the one instrument. seems cheap.

i guess maybe that was her point, which i get, but i would have appreciated a bit more variation in the implementation.

o_O

*_O

I've never seen any footage of it. You're not getting confused with Alive from Off Center, are you?