S/D Laurie Anderson

Was unaware until recently that she had made a CD-ROM game in the mid 90's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYOSLqN5Ns

That's so cool, thanks for sharing

"The Big Top" is really doing it for me lately.

Cities with...no basements
No foundations
Cities that could be moved in a minute
Portable cities
Portable towns

Yeah that's top 10

"The Canadians took this very seriously" one of her best punchlines

Some of my favorites.

Great list

No "Blue Lagoon"? It's such a beautiful fever dream.

Or Another Day In America which includes one of Anderson's best lyrics

And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them
We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow. We can't flood them or blow them up or turn them out
But we are reaching for them
We are reaching for them

^^^ top-notch lyrics, there she nails it!

Touring :)

she's kind of always touring something around these days, often variations on one show. but is she doing shows with Kronos in support of Landfall?

Looks like she's playing shows in support of her new book all the things I lost in the flood. Seems to have also instantly sold out :-/

Was transfixed by her live show in 1988, how is she now?

I saw her a year or so ago do a "The Language of the Future" show (this is a show that varies a lot apparently) and it was great. Was it as great as Empty Spaces, which was the first thing I saw (probably what you saw in 88)? No, it's much more scaled down. But it was better than that Noah/Whale thing she did in the 90's that I hated.

Still mesmeric.

oh it was moby dick, not noah. whatever.

a coworker of mine did sound for an artist at the Day for Night fest a couple months ago and got to see Laurie Anderson. he said she was great, a lot of telling stories... anyway at some point in the set, his best friend came up to him and asked to leave because he was bored because she "wasn't playing any of the hits" lmao

having said that... does she play O Superman these days?

She didn't when I saw her perform.

My gf fucking hated her lol. She doesn't like spoken word

So do you just sing to her all the time?

no I don't think she's done o superman since United States. .... maybe she did a restrospective show at one point, not sure.

She performed o superman on the post 9-11 live in New York album

I've posted about this before, but she did O Superman here literally on the night of 9/11.

only live recordings of O Superman i've found are from those 2001 shows

This is what Greg Kot wrote in 2013 (I was his +1 at this show):

On the night of Sept. 11, 2001, Laurie Anderson decided to go ahead with her scheduled performance at Park West, even though her city had been devastated earlier that day. Here's my Tribune review of that performance.

It was one of those moments "when everything changes," Laurie Anderson sang, in a voice that sounded like she was narrating a documentary: Slightly detached, pleasant in its lilting enunciation, yet ominous. "But you don't know yet, whether it's for the better or the worse."

Nothing would be the same after Tuesday, and everyone at the Park West that night -- most especially Anderson -- knew it. Her songs, some of them written as many as 20 years ago, were eerily evocative of a collective mood that desperately cried out for some sort of public expression.

The staging was stark and somber, in contrast to the multimedia extravaganzas of past Anderson tours. The singer, dressed in black and flanked by three brilliant musicians who conjured atmospheres that exquisitely suited her songs, was in tune with her listeners. She set out to help them make sense of a world that had suddenly, shockingly lost its bearings.

In times of crisis, we look to our artists not necessarily to provide answers, but to give shape and dimension to the doubts and anxieties washing over us. Their work can be a balm or a purge, an acknowledgment that our private fears are shared by others.

That is why Anderson's concert Tuesday was not only welcome, but necessary. Throughout the entire nation, on a day when terrorist attacks reduced many of us to a stunned silence, public performances of any kind were at a premium. But Anderson's instincts were correct: It is far preferable to face the unspeakable together, especially if the artist in question is up to the task, and she was.

The Park West was packed for this homecoming by the 54-year-old native of Glen Ellyn, and she immediately addressed the harsh reality of the day, dedicating the 105-minute performance "to all those who have died today."

It was a straightforward, dignified remark, and it set the tone for what followed: a performance that avoided pathos or melodrama, or too-obvious song selections such as her harrowing "From the Air," yet struck exactly the right chord of empathy and awareness, longing and humor.

The resonance and sturdiness of Anderson's songwriting was put to the test, and it did not falter. Her great themes aren't particularly unique: the intersection of humanity and technology, the price of progress, and the loss of our identity and freedom. But she invests them with quirky insight, haunted musicality and depth of feeling that make her more than just a performance artist coldly tinkering with her high-tech gadgets.

She opened with a melancholy instrumental, performed on violin, with funeral bells chiming and Skuli Sverrisson's bass tracing a path to "Statue of Liberty," chilling in its appropriateness: "Freedom is a scary thing," Anderson sang, "so precious, so easy to lose."

The same was true of "Strange Angels," and its chant of "here they come, here they come," with Sverrisson's bass figures taking on the role of a second voice. For Anderson, who has performed many of her concerts solo backed by intense multimedia sound and imagery, the presence of a band so sensitive to her needs was appropriate and oddly comforting. Only when the music became more strident, approaching the cadences and tempos of conventional rock, did it fail to impress. Mostly, Sverrisson, percussionist Jim Black and keyboardist Peter Scherer were concerned with coloring in the spaces behind Anderson's minimalist keyboards, violin and sing-speak vocals, and they did so beautifully.

Before the austerity became too oppressive, the house lights briefly came on and Anderson suggested the audience draw pictures of her so that she could sell them at her next tour stop. "Good luck with your drawings!" she cheerfully said as pencils and paper were passed out. It was difficult not to laugh at the absurdity, which was precisely the point. She also broke up several songs with spoken-word interludes, which had the earmarks of fables, twisted bedtime stories or nursery rhymes for grownups.

When Anderson got back to business, the concert found its emotional center. "O Superman" remains one of the great compositions of the last two decades, a terrifying portrait of trust, security and love misplaced that Anderson performed solo at her keyboard, the electronically altered beats a cross between rhythmic breathing and a dehumanized last gasp. It was followed by "Slip Away," which sounds like an agnostic's postmodern response to the bluegrass Bible-belt masterpiece "O Death."

With "Love Among the Sailors," Anderson pulled all the threads together, and brought the audience to its feet. The last verse bears repeating, because it so eloquently gave voice to what so many must have been feeling on this day: violated, threatened, but still somehow yearning for community.

“There is a hot wind blowing

Plague drifts across the oceans

And if this is the work of an angry god

I want to look into his angry face

There is no pure land now, no safe place

Come with us into the mountains

Hombres. Sailors. Comrades.”

Landfall album is streaming now on NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2018/02/08/584036854/first-listen-laurie-anderson-kronos-quartet-landfall

How about landfall eh

little overlong - were only human

landfall is OK (I'm kind of over the kronos quartet in general) but her current live show for the book/album is just in fucking credible. one of the greatest live performances from anyone ever.

"The front cover of the CD has the title Live at Town Hall, New York City September 19–20, 2001, however the official title of the album is just Live in New York." 23 tracks, intense, committed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_in_New_York_(Laurie_Anderson_album)

i saw a plane today
flying low
over the island--
but my mind
was somewhere
else

Laurie if you're sadly listening

The birds are on fire

The sky glistening

While I atop my roof stand watching

Staring into the spider's clypeus

Incinerated flesh repelling

While I am on the rooftop yearning

Thinking of you

Laurie if you're sadly listening

Selfishly I miss your missing

The boundaries of our world now

changing

The air is filled with someone's

sick reasons

And I had thought a beautiful

season was

Upon us

Laurie if you're sadly listening

The phones don't work

The bird's afire

The smoke curls black

I'm on the rooftop

Liberty to my right still standing

Laurie evil's gaunt desire is

Upon we

Laurie if you're sadly listening

Know one thing above all others

You were all I really thought of

As the TV blared the screaming

The deathlike snowflakes

Sirens screaming

All I wished was you to be holding

Bodies frozen in time jumping

Bird's afire

One thing me thinking

Laurie if you're sadly listening

Love you

Laurie if you're sadly listening

Love you

Thanks flappy bird. Here's what I scratched out just now, with heaphones on, during my maiden voyage through Landfalland vice-versa:

Xgau not that into it but he not likely for chamber setting even w more words vocal shading ditto electronic than he mentions: some tough, gorgeous, tensile levels of blues is a feeling stuff, prismatic searchlight watchlight in the ceiling, the dipper filling and dipping again---as compelling in its way as heart of a Dog
How they built it
http://kronosquartet.org/projects/detail/landfall

Building another story, sure as Heart of a Dog.

Still haven’t got through landfall as it’s so ducking long

Poem up there by Lou Reed was in the NYT on 10/9/01 - https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/magazine/songs-for-the-city-laurie-sadly-listening.html

Any SF residents get to see the Lou Reed drones concert in Nov? A recording has just surfaced, 4 hours!

i saw laurie anderson last night for the first time! i hope to see her again soon. she played quite a bit of stuff from what i assume was her latest album (and first Grammy winner) Landfall. i have to assume because i sto;; haven't heard Landfall, but i know it's a chamber orchestra based album (which won her a first grammy, too), the artwork projected behind resembles the cover of Landfall, and she played as a duo with a cellist. the show alternated between these beautifully performed duets (his cello and her electric violin) and her more familiar synth and vocoder songs, spoken-word pieces, stories and jokes. at the beginning she played a story by her recently deceased chicago wordsmith friend ken nordine over the speakers, before asking everyone to honor yoko ono's 82nd birthday by screaming as loudly as possible for 10 seconds (my throat still hurts).

i was amazed at how adeptly she created a dreamlike web of circling repetition throughout the evening. alternating pieces with the string duets helped, but there were also funnies stories about writing to jack kennedy as a child for advice about how to run for student council, to be referenced much later in the show with references to "jack" and promising to people whatever it is they want. i would recognize certain snippets of songs, but they seemed to be reappropriated and mixed together with other songs. sometimes dreams themselves were referenced - And ah, these days. Oh, these days / What are days for? / To wake us up, to put between the endless nights - or a warning to never tell anyone about your dreams, because they make you sound insane because they never make any sense. it's hard to explain, but it was mesmerizing.

at the end she talked a bit about lou reed and performed some tai chi.

about an hour after her show i was walking around the museum, checking out some "soundscapes" (actually just pairs of speakers) and ran across her doing an encore performance in the spot where the stars of the lid soundscape was supposed to be:

https://i.imgur.com/6iQyVZa.jpg

sorry for typos. tl;dr she really is a treasure, we're lucky we still have her. everyone should go see her if you haven't already

that sounds amazing! every time I've seen her perform over the years it's been magical.

I just recently became aware of the 1960s Smithsonian Folkways recording of Marian Seldes reading Gertrude Stein, and immediately thought: Woah, Laurie Anderson must have listened to a lot of this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RpnLjR45ZM#t=3m57s

thanks for sharing that, I've had this post bookmarked for a week and I finally put that on and got a lot of writing done, zoomed by in the zone. otm about the influence

at the beginning of the movie
they know they have to find each other--
but they ride off
in opposite directions!

Two pro-shot shows, both released because of the quarantine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohblFNYnjE

Laurie Anderson "All the Things I Lost in the Flood" (Town Hall NYC 2/15/18)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbuinUOV9Cc

2020 Vanguard Gala Honoring Laurie Anderson (Joe's Pub Live! 2/3/20)

-Lafcadio Cass
-Ryuichi Sakamoto
-Starr Busby with Stuart Bogie, Alex Koi & Colin Stetson - “From the Air”
-Carl Hancock Rux - “The Puppet Motel”
-Shara Nova with Stuart Bogie & Colin Stetson - “Beautiful Red Dress”
-Theo Bleckmann - “Falling”
-Alex Koi - “Gravity’s Angel”
-Theo Bleckmann & Helga Davis - “Walking and Falling”
-Colin Stetson & DM Stith - “Fear of the Unknown and the Blazing Sun”
-Nona Hendryx with Kiki Hawkins, Asa Lovechild & Alex Sopp - “This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)”
-Christina Courtin - “Flow”
-Meg Harper directed by Derrick Belcham (film) with My Brightest Diamond “The Beginning of Memory”
-Joan as Police Woman - “Blue Lagoon”
-Morley Shanti Kamen - “Only An Expert”
-Justin Hicks - “Nothing Left but Their Names”
-mmeadows (Kristin Slipp & Cole Kamen-Green) - “Walk the Dog”
-Meshell Ndegeocello - “O Superman”
-Theo Bleckmann & Nona Hendryx - “In Our Sleep”

Great, thanks, Hideous! This isn't great, but told my blog and that year's UpRoxx ballot more about Landfall, an underappreciated album, it seems:
On Landfall, Anderson's violin and keyboard loops and grooves guide Kronos through vast flooded condo corridors, occasionally checking the stars (yep, still awesome-sounding) that she never got around to naming, in that slowed-goofy-male voice, once more or less purely satirical, that now seems more personal-global, or at least more lived-in, than ever.

joan wasser's version of "blue lagoon" is beautiful. not really breaking new ground but just amazing.

Over the years I've been checking out previously un-heard (to me) corners of her back catalogue, mistakenly thinking that I'm going to find some line that I will eventually refuse to cross, perhaps some horrible eighties production values or technologically-dated pretensions, but I haven't yet found one and it's nearly all fantastic.

she's doing a "sound meditation" on Sunday via Zoom: https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/course/a-solstice-eve-sound-meditation-with-laurie-anderson/

Here's what she played:

1. Max Richter, Dream 1 (before the wind blows it all away), Sleep
2. William Basinski, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Lamentations
3. The Mills Brothers, Ida Sweet as Apple Cide,The Decca Singles vol. 1: 1934-1937
4. Fritz Kreisler, Humoresque, Op. 101 No. 7
5. Laurie Anderson, Flow Homeland
6. Allen Ginsberg, Father Death Blues, The Last Word on First Blues
7. Christmas music, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2tx5NHDcHA, 8 hours of vintage department store Christmas music- customusic tapes
8. Negativland, We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here, The World Will Decide
9. Negativland, Why Are We Waiting, The World Will Decide
10. Laurie Anderson, Birds, Expo Japan 2005
11. Lou Reed, I’m Set Free, Brian Eno cover “Fickle Sun (III) I’m Set Free
12.Laurie Anderson, Dark Bells, Heart of a Dog
13. Philip Glass/Rumi, Don’t Go Back to Sleep, Monsters of Grace
14. Astor Piazzola, Tanguedia III, Tango: Zero Hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zUEroBzyv8

only up until 5pm EST on March 4th

https://x.com/clavendr/status/1736786186813771811?s=46&t=u2ZSlsY3trRV36IPP6jNDQ

O Superman is getting trending use on TikTok and IG but many young-ins don’t know that it’s Laurie Anderson

The New York–based artist and musician Laurie Anderson said she would not take up a visiting professor position at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, amid scrutiny over her views on Palestine.

Earlier this month, the school announced that Anderson, who has produced such works as the hit 1981 song “O Superman,” had been appointed its Pina Bausch Professor, a position named after a famed dancer. But since that announcement, the school appears to have reneged on its decision, citing the fact that Anderson signed a 2021 open letter that urges support for Palestine.
“To frame this as a war between two equal sides is false and misleading,” the letter reads. “Israel is the colonizing power. Palestine is colonized. This is not a conflict: this is apartheid.”

Moreover, the letter continues, “We have seen how governments in Europe and beyond recently have instated policies of open censorship, and fostered a culture of self-censorship, towards Palestinian solidarity. Conflating legitimate criticism of the State of Israel and its policies towards Palestinians with antisemitism is cynical. Racism, including antisemitism, and all forms of hate, are heinous and not welcome in the Palestinian struggle. It is time to stand up to these tactics of silencing and overcome them.”

She was one of thousands to sign the letter, whose signatories also included artists such as Nan Goldin, Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, and many more.

On Friday, the Folkwang University of the Arts issued a press release saying that Anderson would no longer be taking up the position at the school on April 1. Specifically, the release claimed that the letter “takes up boycott demands from the anti-Israel BDS movement,” even though neither the movement itself nor a boycott of Israel are ever mentioned in the text. (In Germany, BDS has been particularly controversial, with some political figures attempting to render it illegal.)

“For me the question isn’t whether my political opinions have shifted,” Anderson said in a statement. “The real question is this: Why is this question being asked in the first place? Based on this situation I withdraw from the project. My colleagues at the University and the Pina Bausch Foundation have discussed this with me at great length and we have jointly decided this is the best way forward.”

In its release, the university said the decision came amid “the context of the current discourse about freedom of art and freedom of expression.”

It was the latest such development in a country whose art scene has been roiled by the October 7 Hamas attack, with many artists who voice pro-Palestine views facing the prospect of canceled exhibitions and withdrawn opportunities.

Earlier this month, Berlin attempted to implement a funding clause reliant upon a definition of antisemitism that many said would be used to keep pro-Palestine artists from receiving money. After mass protests, the funding clause was ultimately repealed.