S/D Laurie Anderson

also i'm going to straight up lift a few of her video/presentation/visual aides from that, because goddamn

Yes. thanks---I wonder if the replay of the radio shows she mentions are going to be at 4:00am again---? Wouldn't be the same effect she describes if I set the alarm, grab a coffee--will just have to stay awake 'til they start.
Her acceptance speech for Lou at R&Roll Hall of Fame--balance to what she says about music in lecture and pretty fine anyway (comments about "Lulu" most of the balance. also now we go from Eno to re:Arethe etc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VaeEmBPmGk

I think the next one is 3/24.

The next radio show!? What station? I'm guessing wfmu. Anyway, she's in good company amidst Steinski's Rough Mix: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/56137

https://www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/archives/party-in-the-bardo-conversations-with-laurie-anderson-archive.html

no, the next Norton lecture. which apparently has a conversation / Q&A portion after the lecture, so I signed up for the second one.

Bummed that, it appears, they aren't posting the rest of the conversations in this series.

The Mahindra Humanities Center is pleased to announce an upcoming broadcast of Laurie Anderson's second Norton Lecture, initially presented on March 24, 2021. The Forest will be available to watch online for a limited time. The recording will premiere at 5pm EDT on April 7, 2021 and will remain available for the next 24 hours, until 5pm EDT on April 8, 2021.

it'll be here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd68fLDyN_4

thanks, put it on my calendar!

Fantastic!

Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut album, Big Science, will return to vinyl for the first time in thirty years with a new red vinyl edition due April 9 on Nonesuch Records. The vinyl includes the re-mastered original album first released on CD for the 25th anniversary of Big Science on Nonesuch in 2007.
...While working on her now-legendary seven-hour performance art/theater piece United States, Part I–IV, she cut the spare "O Superman (For Massenet)," an electronic-age update of 19th century French operatic composer Jules Massenet’s aria ‘O Souverain’, for the tiny New York City indie label 110 Records. In the UK, DJ John Peel picked up a copy of this very limited-edition 33⅓ RPM 7” and spun the eight-minute-plus track on BBC Radio 1. The exposure resulted in an unlikely #2 hit, lots of attention in the press, and a worldwide deal with Warner Bros. Records.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!
..."In the ’70s I traveled a lot," Anderson recounts. "I worked on a tobacco farm in Kentucky, hitchhiked to the North Pole, lived in a yurt in Chiapas, and worked on a media commune. I had my own romantic vision of the road. My plan was to make a portrait of the country. Big Science, the first part of the puzzle, eventually became part two of United States I–IV (Transportation, Politics, Money, Love). My goal was to be not just the narrator but also the outsider, the stranger. Although I was fascinated by the United States, this portrait was also about how the country looked from a distance. I was performing a lot in Europe, where American culture was simultaneously booed and cheered. But the portrait was also a picture of a culture inventing a digital world and learning to live in it. Big Science was about technology, size, industrialization, shifting attitudes toward authority, and individuality. It was sometimes alarmist, picturing the country as a burning building, a plane crash. Alongside the techno was the apocalyptic. The absurd. The everyday. It was also a series of short stories about odd characters—hatcheck clerks and pilots, preachers, drifters and strangers. There was something about Massenet's aria ‘O Souverain’—which inspired ‘O Superman’—that almost stopped my heart. The pauses, the melody. 'O souverain, ô juge, ô père' (O Lord, o judge, o father). A prayer about empire, ambition, and loss."
https://www.nonesuch.com/albums/big-science-lp?eml=2021April2%2F5293848%2F6011771&etsubid=33248291
And here,, in conversation w Will Young on BBC2:https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tnsk?eml=2021April2/5293848/6011771&etsubid=33248291

The olde Official Video is in that Nonesuch link too.

Would it kill them to re-release United States Live?

Christ, it’s ridiculous that LAURIE ANDERSON HOME OF THE BRAVE never got a DVD. Her website mentioned a box of her WB works some years ago, and I think it was supposed to include it

Really would love for them to release The Ugly One with the Jewels on vinyl too fwiw.

She's a guest on this week's Adam Buxton podcast too - https://www.adam-buxton.co.uk/podcasts

Laurie Anderson hitchhiked...to the North Pole??

Really would love for them to release /The Ugly One with the Jewels/ on vinyl too fwiw.

I haven’t heard this one before - what is it like?

As someone who's always been a fan of her spoken word cadence and learned, through the years, to appreciate her music compositions, it was for sure a gateway drug. It's all spoken word and it's all hypnotic to me.

Laurie Anderson hitchhiked...to the North Pole??

She references doing so on the Ugly One with the Jewels and I always wondered if she had really done that!

(and for my money, that's her best album)

I really love that album and that story in particular

The whole routine about being stopped by security in Israel is all-time

iirc the North Pole trip is real? I think the hardcover book covers that

TUOWTJ is almost completely spoken-word iirc, right?

Basically yes, and a (highly edited) live album.

Her narratives are so confidently related in her work that I always assumed they're all made up. Like the scene from "It Was Up in the Mountains" from United States Live... did that really happen?

I had a really nice afternoon a few years back when I took acid and wandered around a park listening to The Ugly One With the Jewels, it's kind of perfectly balanced between funny and unsettling and comforting.

I'm really hoping this is the first of multiple reissues? So much of her best work is hard to find on any physical format.

wow, I guess it's not surprising but the majority of her albums are indeed OOP in any physical format.

Ugly One and Bright Red were both great albums and should be in print again and on vinyl, that would be nice.

Home of the Brave: here's a really nice looking visual remaster someone did and put on youtube. It's been there for quite a while so I don't think it's going to be removed. I wouldn't hold out hope for any kind of official re-release since I've heard she has little to no interest in revisiting her past works. I wonder what kind of visual documentation there is of things like Nerve Bible and Empty Spaces? Empty Spaces was the first show I ever saw of hers and it was thrilling but so long ago I barely remember it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v663kBnsD0A

I've heard she has little to no interest in revisiting her past works

this is a shame, do you have a source or can you expand? it also explains the weird out-of-print issues.

brb gonna salvage my HOTB interview 2LP from the sell pile in the basement

I attended a screening of HOME OF THE BRAVE. She says the hitchhiking story is true, although she didn’t quite reach the magnetic North Pole

Anderson also explained at said screening that she is proud of the music in it, but that the visuals make her “cringe” which is nuts to me

it's almost uniformly amazing. maybe she cringes at whatever is going on at about 1:02:45, because holy shit they really ham it up for a while there, lol

"Radar", at 45:12, is maybe the best thing i've ever seen

"do you have a source or can you expand? " Anil Prasad told me that based off conversations and interviews he's done with her.

That kind of attitude is admirable but I wish there were a way to thread the needle between not forcing an artist into Legacy Mode and ensuring their past work is properly archived/made available

As lukas noted upthread, part 2 of the Norton Lectures is now live until 5pm EDT on April 8th:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd68fLDyN_4

"It has never been more pertinent": Margaret Atwood on the chilling genius of Laurie Anderson’s 'Big Science'

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/08/margaret-atwood-laurie-anderson-big-science-o-superman-prophetic-80s-america-pertinent

Free registration now open for lecture 3, 4/14 at 5ET

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lecture-3-rocks-laurie-anderson-spending-the-war-without-you-tickets-148381147005

(the last one she prerecorded her segment, fwiw)

She's programming a day of music today at NTS.

(Link above doesn't seem to work. https://www.nts.live/shows/nts-10-laurie-anderson )

Long, big-picture profile in this Sunday's NY Times.

Laurie in Smithsonian Mag & Hirshhorn---live performances coming later:

AT THE SMITHSONIAN | OCTOBER 25, 2021

The Multiple Arts and Artistries of the Inimitable Laurie Anderson:
A Hirshhorn retrospective opens with ten new works from the pioneering artist, composer, poet and musician

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-multiple-arts-and-artistries-of-the-inimitable-laurie-anderson-180978912/?eml=2021October29/5506248/6011771&etsubid=33248291

Cool, thanks for the heads up! I'll be in DC for Thanksgiving, and hopefully the Metra will be repaired and running regularly by then.

another of her lectures is up for the next 18 hours or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6HsjTeQBQ

the fake scarcity of the lectures is beyond annoying, just put them all up ffs

I do love that at the end of this I'm going to have a new 6-hour Laurie Anderson album on my phone.

the fake scarcity of the lectures is beyond annoying, just put them all up ffs

otm

maybe they will at the end

thanks for the heads up though, on this one! I am watching the 4th one now. every time i listen to her at length i come to think that she is my very favorite artist of all, musical or otherwise. then some time passes and i listen and look at other things and i forget about her a bit. then i come back and am even more sure that she is the greatest