Tim Knox
By any measure, February will be a landmark month for Laurie Anderson, the multimedia and performance artist who has long characterized the term “avant-garde.”
On Feb. 16 Nonesuch Records will release Landfall, Anderson’s first recording with San Francisco’s legendary Kronos Quartet. The 30-cut recording — available on audio CD, MP3 and vinyl — chronicles the artist’s personal experience during Hurricane Sandy, the deadly “super storm” that ravaged the Atlantic Coast in 2012.
On Feb. 6, New York fine arts publisher Rizzoli Electa will release Laurie Anderson: All the Things I Lost in the Flood. Anderson’s first full-length book chronicles 40 years of artistic output sifted from her personal archives and curated by the artist herself.
And on Feb. 9, Anderson returns to Shannon Hall at the Memorial Union on the UW campus. It’s one of only four U.S. and European dates the artist has scheduled for this spring. No doubt content from Landfall, along with her earlier cutting-edge works, will dominate the evening’s program.
The Kronos Quartet will not be joining Anderson at Shannon Hall, but the artists already have performed Landfall together on a number of occasions in Australia and the U.S. One of those performances was at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The New York Times said Anderson’s music “set the auditorium awash in elegiac string sounds and postmillennial gloom. Performed by the composer and the tirelessly innovative Kronos Quartet, the work, written in New York during that epic storm, often resembled the flotsam bobbing on the receding floodwaters, with poignant snippets and small treasures.” The Washington Post called it “riveting, gorgeous.”
Like other Anderson compositions, Landfall is a synthesis of emotion, imagery and electronica, combining Kronos Quartet’s sonorous strings with Anderson’s spoken word observations.
“These are stories with tempos,” Anderson says in an interview on the Nonesuch website. “I’ve always been fascinated by the complex relationship of words and music, whether in song lyrics, supertitles or voice-over.”
The composition also fully incorporates Anderson’s love for electronic music, including some new approaches of her own design. This includes use of an optigan, a keyboard that utilizes information stored on optical discs.
“In Landfall, instruments initiate language through our new text software, erst,” she explains. “The blend of electronic and acoustic strings is the dominant sound of Landfall. Much of the music in this work is generated from the harmonies and delays of unique software designed for the solo viola and reinterpreted for the quartet.”
Born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, in 1947, Anderson burst onto New York’s performance art world in the 1970s, combining language, technology, art and music in new ways. The music world began to take notice in 1981 when Anderson’s seminal song “O Superman” rose to number two on the British pop charts.
The unlikely hit, built upon an aria from Jules Massenet’s 1885 opera Le Cid, used an Eventide Harmonizer to produce a looped vocal of a single syllable pulsating like a heartbeat and mixed with two alternating chords played against a largely sparse musical background. Most of Anderson’s spoken-word lyrics were synthesized through a vocorder to give them an eerie electronic edge.
Anderson, trained on the violin and as a sculptor, followed her artistic mixed-media muse into the new century; in 2003, she became NASA’s first artist-in-residence. Since then, she has helped create the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, co-created a media project for the Paris Opera Ballet, and collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Philip Glass and her late husband, former Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed.
Anderson’s lineage of artistic innovation and experimentation continues with Landfall, according to Kronos Quartet founder and violinist David Harrington.
“Laurie Anderson is the master magician musician who has always inhabited those secret places where technology has personality, where ‘real time’ is questioned, and where all the elements of performance meet and combine into music,” Harrington told Nonesuch. “Her sense of play and fun and her continuous experimenting make her the ideal chemist — or is it alchemist — in the laboratory of music.”
