Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson may not fit conveniently in with what is generally considered progressive rock, but then she does not fit
conveniently in with most categories. A multi-media artist from New York's avant-garde underground, Anderson had included
musical compositions as part of her repertoire for years, when in 1981 she made an unexpected jump to British pop charts
with "O Superman", an 8-minute song of tape loops, vocoder vocals and stark synthesizer minimalism that drew its
inspiration from Jules Massenet's "O Souverain", a cry for help to God. Only in Anderson's version it is the disembodied
voice of an answering machine in the aftermath of the hostage crisis and Desert One pleading attention from the military,
industry, technology and, yes, Superman - the supposed gods of the high-tech, neoconservative America of the early-1980s.
Intertextual and idiomatic, catchy but off-beat, serious yet playful, "O Superman" is the microcosm of Anderson's musical
oeuvre.
Her debut album Big Science is lot like its monochrome cover shot of spiky-haired and andronygous Anderson in a
white-washed suit and goggles against a stark grey background. It builds on insistent rhythm tracks, just as often samples,
loops or electronic sounds as conventional percussion, over which spare synthesizer or Farfisa chords, drones or melodies
build or often just linger. The sound itself is dry and unadorned, even cheap-sounding at places. It owes lot to the
repetitive mimimalism of Terry Reilly, the wonky melodicism and atmospheres of Brian Eno's
Another Green World and the clinical abstractions of academic avant-garde (e.g. "Example #22" that collages
moronic pop, screechy wailing and spoken passages in German).
And in the middle of it all is Anderson's oddly melodious and friendly voice that almost never rises beyond recitation,
almost never really sings, as it relates the weirdest stories in a simple, everyday language. Language is, more than
anything else, Anderson's main instrument, and her texts cheerfully mix everything from biblical imagery, ad lines, catch
phrases, fairytales, popular science texts and everyday observations to create the kind of surreal poetry that can turn a
simple act of walking into a mythical experience or spell out post-modern theoretical babble in amusing vignettes with
little pretension. The end result can range from self-mocking silliness to clever social commentary. At best it throws up
songs like "Born, Never Asked" and the title track, solemnly ambling, almost gothic electronica full of imagery of progress
and American set phrases that in the context assume more the aura of alienation, banality and pipe dreams than of the
industrialist and individualist utopia they were used to peddle. So from a traditional progressive rock viewpoint, it is a
move from maximalism to minimalism, from epic to everyday, from cosmic seriousness to ironic commentary - truly the
eighties ethos. But along with Peter Gabriel's fourth album and
Kate Bush's The Dreaming, Big Science was the most
exciting transmutation of contemporary pop music to appear in 1982.
All these songs were extracted from United States I-IV, a five-hour stage production that Anderson had been writing
for over a decade before staging and recording it in 1983. The 5-LP/4-CD set does not really give a complete picture of the
event that had a strong visual element, including films, mime and Anderson's quirky self-made instruments, such as the
tape-bow violin and miked glasses. Many of the performances feature just Anderson speaking against synthesizer drones or
backdrops and employing harmonizers to raise her voice into a piping falsetto or drop it into a rumbling authoritarian
huff. Elsewhere there is everything from tape collages to a bagpipe solo, so the actual songs form maybe only a third of
the whole set. The extended versions of "Big Science" and "O Superman" do benefit from the hall ambience, and there is a
batch of other strong songs here, ranging from the slow ambient reverie "Blue Lagoon" to the almost funk-tinged "Language
Is a Virus from Outer Space" (Anderson would remake most of these songs on her next two albums). The whole thing is a bit
too cumbersome to be taken in one go and as a whole as fragmentary as what it is suppose to portray, the contemporary
United States in the turbulence of information revolution and the utopian and dystopian effects it has on the society
trying to cope with it. The music is primarily for avant-garde fans, but even a more conservative progressive rock fan may
like some of the songs, or at least be struck by some of the bizarre imagery of Anderson's stories, such as that of
spermatozoa the size of sperm whales swimming across the Pacific at mach 20.
Mister Heartbreak is often regarded as Anderson's artistic and popular peak. In place of the spare bleakness of
Big Science this album abounds with then-state-of-the-art synthesizer sounds and features substantial contributions
from the likes of Bill Laswell and Adrian Belew, whose flatulent guitar flailing offers a stinging contrast to the swarming
synthscapes of the opening track "Sharkey's Day". This song cheerfully flaunts the pop textures and vocabulary of the day,
yet never settles into that mould. Neither does the rest of the album, which rests more on the then-novel ambient ideas,
but also closes with William Burroughs reciting the rest of Anderson's non-narrative on Mr. Sharkey against the funky
rhythms, synth brass and other pop candy that really sound alien in the context. The tolling chant "Gravity's Angel" and
the Asian-sounding reverie "Kokoku" attain their strength more from the synergy of Anderson's voice and the haunting
soundscapes (including a skilful use of other vocalists) than the actual harmonic developments.
Peter Gabriel contributes vocals on three tracks and co-wrote the song "Excellent
Birds" (a different mix appears as "This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)" on the cassette and CD versions of
Gabriel's So), and his influence is telling in the use of layered rhythms,
spare bass vamps and Synclavier-generated textures. This album is a finely-crafted balancing act between listener-friendly
1980s rock sound and timeless weirdness, and the fact that twenty years later it sounds both the product of its time and
utterly relevant still, attests its success.
Home of the Brave, ostensibly a selection of tunes from the soundtrack of the eponymous Anderson performance movie, is
less successful in maintaining that balance. The short aural movie still "White Lily" and the three instrumental tracks
hang more or less out on the experimental limb, with all kinds of sonic curiosities created with electric violin,
synthesizer, Belew's guitar and the kind of dabbling voice sample manipulations reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre's
Zoolook (which Anderson contributed to). On the other hand, "Talk Normal" and "Language Is a Virus" (here funked up by
dance producer Nile Rogers) are stuffed too full of then-hip rhythms and polished pop paraphernalia of the day to really
come to life. Also the already short album includes an extended reworking of "Sharkey's Night" which appeared on Mister
Heartbreak. While certainly enjoyable, this is the one Anderson album that tries too hard to stand on two benches at the
same time.
Strange Angels goes for an all-out quirky pop approach and actually works much better as a result. For the first time
Anderson sings majority of the material (in a pleasant soprano), with only the sober voice-and-keyboard pads piece "The
Dream Before" connecting with what had gone before. "Coolsville" is all cold sheen and hypnotic synth bass, while "The Day
the Devil" is an over-the-top combination of stomping percussion and voices, gospel choruses and Anderson's hilarious,
effects-enhanced soliloquy as Devil the no-bullshit salesman coming to sweep away the consumerist congregation. Even the
more standard pop numbers are not without their charm and tricks, especially in the vocal and percussion arrangements,
though progressive rock fans will probably be least taken by this album. Its single release "Beautiful Red Dress", a
debunking of PMS myths and a polemic about women's status in the job market, was one of her more openly political songs,
and indicative of her priorities over the next few years. When she eventually re-emerged with a new album, the eighties
were long over and her approach reflected the change.
Co-produced and partly co-written by Brian Eno, Bright Red takes a big step back to the spoken-word sparseness of her
early works, yet with a smooth, synthy ambient sound of the 1990s. Neither overly avant nor accessible, the album suffers
from occasional lack of edge, but at its best it strikes a good, mature balance between the opposites. For example, "Muddy
River" has a strong and infective vocal melody, yet it is accompanied only by a cumbersome beat that heightens the song's
melancholic, hope-against-hope mood, while "Tightrope" and "Same Time Tomorrow" are Anderson at her narrative best, all
shimmering synths, subliminal percussion and spectral vocal effects backing up the hypnotic voice and its poignant imagery.
The lyrical focus is now more clearly on personal issues of memory, communication and loss, of delving into the past at the
onset of an uncertain new era, though her continued obsession with the dehumanising aspects of information technology
resurfaces in updated, new media forms ("Puppet Motel").
That same year Anderson published "Stories from the Nerve Bible", a retrospective book of stories spanning her whole
career, and embarked on a short reading tour. One of these was performances was preserved as The Ugly One with the
Jewels. As it consists of Anderson reading her stories with minimal accompaniment from synthesizers, pre-recorded tapes
and occasional guest percussion or guitar, it is only marginally engaging as a musical experience (apart from chillingly
intense performances of "Same Time Tomorrow" and "White Lily", the latter eclipsing the original studio version), but an
amusing overview of Anderson's stock of surreal stories all the same.
Life on a String carries on the overall style of Bright Red, but has a bit more accessible and richer sound, including
some string arrangements and even the use of Mellotron, and more liberal attitude in using elements of pop, jazz, classical
and contemporary world music. It is musically the most interesting in the violin-led songs like "Slip Away" and the
instrumental "Here with You", the least in numbers like "One Beautiful Evening" whose rather prosaic composition and
arrangements serve to remind that while Anderson has been flirting with "mainstream" pop music throughout her musical
career, lot of her originally left-field ideas have now become established and even fashionable parts of that "mainstream".
She defuses the predictability bomb with the eclecticism of individual songs on the one hand (e.g. the jumbled-up
electrobeats and the mock-"attitude" vocal delivery of "My Compensation" followed by the cartoonish orchestral show tune
"Dark Angel") and choice bits of idiosyncratic composition on the other (the title track). The somewhat sombre lyrical
material tends to lack the surreal bite of her best work: the sentiment of "Statue of Liberty" and the melancholy imagery
of "Washington Street" may be heartfelt but come across as nearly banal. It is the shining hymns "One White Whale" and
"Pieces and Parts", originally part of the 1999 stage production "Songs and Stories from Moby Dick", where Anderson's
musical and lyrical vision coalesce with crystalline melodies and snappy metaphors that link mythical to mundane. Hence the
album is a combination of old and new, hit and miss, and darker than anything since Big Science yet probably her least
overtly electronic work.
So twenty years after her popular music debut, Anderson's artistic vision is still very much alive and evolving. For the
uninitiated, the live-set Live in New York and the compilation Talk Normal (drawing from all albums except
Life on a String) offer a comprehensive retrospective on those twenty years of Laurie Anderson as a teller of tall
tales, charter of American mythology and, yes, progressive musician (in the widest sense of the word). The live album is
also recommended to seasoned listeners, as many of the songs are given a whole different perspective in this four-strong
band setting. -- Kai Karmanheimo
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Amaran's Plight - Gary Wehrkamp, D. C. Cooper, Nick D'Virgilio and Kurt Barabas
Amarok at IV festa Cosesnostres at La Rulot, Barcelona, Spain, 10/28/06
Amazing Blondel 1972 - John Gladwin, Eddie Baird and Terry Wincott
Amenophis 2nd Period (1987-1989) - René Kius, Kurt Poppe, Wolfgang Vollmuth,
Michael Roessmann, Elke Möhrle
Amoeba Split (captured from YouTube video) - Ricardo Castro (piano and Hammond
organ, hidden behind speaker on left), Fernando Lamas (drums), Alberto Villarroya
(bass), María Toro (vocals and flute) and Martín Blanes (guitar
and stick), Also in the band but not pictured, Pablo Añón
(sax).
Ancient Future - the band members of AF shift around depending on what sort
of concert they are playing. This sub-group is Doug McKeehan (keyboards), Matthew
Montfort (scalloped fretboard guitar & other string instruments), Ustad Habib
Khan (sitar), Emam (tabla, doumbek, percussion) and Irina Mikhailova (vocals)
Ancient Vision - (in no particular order) Tom May (keyboards, guitar), Barry Spry (bass),
Russ Gross (guitar), Rob Leytham (drums), Tom Hook (vocals), Joe Allen (keyboards)
Jon Anderson
Andromeda - John Cann (guitar, vocals), Mick Hawksworth (bass, vocals),
Ian McShane - drums
Anekdoten
