S/D Laurie Anderson

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

holy crap, only 6 hours left, but this is very, very good, and i'm looking forward to the rest of her lecture series. sometimes when she quotes someone, she puts an image of them and animates their mouths moving as they speak. for example, laurie/eno is currently talking to me about ambient music.

she may be my favorite artist, i guess

thank you for the link and head's up, f. hazel. watching that before i went to bed last night put me in a better place

also, check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTxqg8g_jXM

first of all, we should all be so lucky to be wheeled out on a platform by assistants. but then check out her human sampler performance and then utterly charming conversation/demo afterward.

This lecture was a treat, thanks.

One time I think Laurie Anderson came into a shop I was working in and I spoke to her briefly. I'm pretty sure.

did she ask what flower, expresses, days go by ... pulling you into the future ... and they just keep going by, endlessly, pulling ...

She said... do you stock... Apple... Macintosh? I said... no.

these are good videos thank you both

i still barely know anything about her. i've never seen a bad laurie anderson youtube video, actually. sometimes she's a video artist, sometimes spoken word (a term she apparently hates and in that lecture she requests that her audience come up with a "snappier" name for it), sometimes instrumental music, sometimes all of it at once. always conceptual, i guess. that's what ties them all together.

sorry - i got sidetracked. what i meant was - i just type in "laurie anderson" in youtube every few months and something astounding immediately comes up, and i see that there are dozens more just beneath that. she populated a sea of mesmerizing videos and music, we all owe her thousands of dollars

i see laurie anderson as among those whose very lives have become a piece of art, or performance. but where that can be so, SO, annoying and even alienating with so many other people who have tried to do it, with laurie anderson i come away more impressed every time. as she gets older, her words and messages are getting warmer and more...comforting...but also her sense of humor is somehow getting both sharper and more subtly deployed. with everything. in interviews, in lectures. i saw her speak and play and show and tell at the art institute of chicago a couple years ago. after her performance, she wandered down the hall with one of the other musicians and they played instrumental duets (she on viola) out in the middle of one of the big hallway exhibits of ancient sculpture, with a small amp. i sat behind her and got lots of good pics of their setup from her pov, but with a perfectly chiseled ancient ass as the frame.

lol, i suddenly realized i've told this whole story before. i'm going to grab the image from above but not read my telling of it back then, to see how warped my memories have become

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

hmm, i see see that now i think she "wandered" down the hall. i don't know. she probably did.

i loved one part in that first lecture above (which i think is still up til 5 pm EST today) where she talked about teaching ancient syrian and egyptian art history, and she couldn't remember so she just started making up things. and then later, got fired/quit. :D

It's probably not your fault but it took me a moment there to realise with some relief that you were talking about a statue's ass and not LA's ;-)

lol, hey she may be old but she is not ancient! either way, i'd say that we should put her on the $100 bill but it seems to disgusting to mix her up with the world of printed circulation. but she's a national treasure at any rate

<3

is the national debt long, or is it wide?

repeatedly mentions “just a lot of questions” in this. at least as central to her technique as aquatic disaster

she is a master of the arresting question

obviously there's the zen koan connection too, and she cites them so frequently. i've never really been able to find a way into zen koans (not that i've given it a serious level of effort, like the amount of effort that it takes to run a ilm poll. so maybe i should...run another ilm poll!). but i kind of see her questions as related to those, maybe as her own versions of those for the modern day, and it makes me appreciate both her and also kind of helps me think of how those koans might be useful for other people too