Dreams, downpours, love and loss – New York musician Laurie Anderson has a new album out, inspired by a storm and dedicated to her late husband, Lou Reed, writes
Grant Smithies.
Don’t you just hate it when people tell you their dreams? What was vivid and intense to them in the night – a wild surrealist movie, unfolding in the dark for a snoring audience of one – has been leached of all colour and meaning by the time they tell you about it in the morning.
Other people’s dreams are boring – let’s face it.
Except Laurie Anderson’s dreams. They are quite something.
Artist, musician, inventor, long-term partner of the late Lou Reed, Anderson once did an art show in New York in which she reinterpreted her dreams as drawings, prints and video works.
More recently, she’s just made a record with renowned New York string ensemble, the Kronos Quartet.
It’s called Landfall, and there’s a song on there about dreams. It’s hilarious.
‘‘Oh, good. I’m glad to hear that,’’ says Anderson on the line from her New York apartment.
Soft, clear and warm, her voice has the same careful cadences I used to listen to again and again on her hit song, O Superman, during the early 80s.
‘‘You know, people think of me as being so serious, so it’s good that someone finds me funny once in a while.’’
The dream? Laurie walks into a studio somewhere in Germany and encounters a naked dude playing the flute. He has tiny microphones glued all over his body to capture the sound in as naturalistic a way as possible.
Behind a glass partition, the recording engineers have spent the few hours obsessing over rustling fabric. You’ve gotta take that shirt off, bro, they say. It’s affecting the recording. OK, now lose the pants…
One by one, they’ve made the poor guy shed his shirt, his pants, his jocks, his shoes and socks. Now he is standing there, butt naked, tootling on his flute.
‘‘See, the thing is, that actually happened,’’ says Anderson. ‘‘Oh, that studio was nuts! It’s an experimental place in Germany, and they had all these fantastically fabulous microphones, all recording this single flute.’’
Anderson is really interested in new recording techniques, she says, because what a musician hears is so different from what their audience gets to hear.
When she plays her violin, it reverberates around the bones of her skull. She can hear the steel strings sawing and the wood creaking. She can smell the little puffs of rosin that burst from her bow during the faster passages.
It’s an immersive experience where you’re somehow inside the sound, and she’s spent years trying to replicate that sonic intimacy for her listeners.
‘‘I’m always trying to capture that private sound that’s inside your head when you’re a musician. I don’t mean, you know… accusatory voices, saying stuff like – ‘Oh, you didn’t play that very well’!’’
She chuckles at this. ‘‘I mean the sound you hear up close when you’re playing it, rather than something that comes off the stage or out of a speaker. Artists are just beginning to experiment with that sort of strange spatial sound, and it’s really exciting. That song about dreams is really a little story about different ways of perceiving sound.’’
Now 70, Anderson has always looked much the same in photographs: impish smile, wee wiry frame, high cheekbones, spiky hair, the faintly bemused demeanour of a long-time Buddhist.
Before she gate-crashed the pop charts in the early 80s, she had already established a career as a sculptor and performance artist.
Her first major piece? A symphony played on car horns. And she once staged an infamous show called Duets On Ice, where she would play her violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with their blades frozen into a giant block of ice. Once the ice melted away, the performance was over.
Fascinated with technology, Anderson went on to invent a TapeBow Violin, which plays a length of pre-recorded magnetic tape across a violin-mounted tape head, and the Talking Stick, a six-foot long electronic baton that breaks down and recombines tiny grains of sound into surprising new forms.
She was stunned to find herself embraced by the musical mainstream after she made O Superman, a very strange eight-minute single based around a Massenet opera.
When the song hit number two on the UK charts in 1981, Warners signed her to a seven-album contract, and an unlikely art-pop star was born.
She’s still best known for early albums Big Science (1982) and Mister Heartbreak (1984) but has consistently made surprising work ever since, squeezing out musical collaborations with Phillip Glass, William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and Lou Reed between a host of other film, video and theatre projects. Landfall is her 13th solo album, and songs about dreams aside, it’s largely a record about dark horizons, howling wind, rain that pours down so persistently that you suspect someone, somewhere, is surely gathering animals and building an ark.
On October 29, 2012, an unprecedented weather event named Superstorm Sandy swept into New York City, submerging streets and subway lines, businesses and houses, and flooding the Manhattan home where Anderson and Reed lived.
It was terrifying, monstrous, catastrophic. It was also, she says, strangely beautiful, and changed Anderson’s life profoundly.
When the Kronos Quartet artistic director David Harrington first approached her about a collaborative work years earlier, Anderson declined, then she thought that perhaps this storm and its aftermath was a story they might tell together.
The players workshopped songs for more than a year, with Anderson’s rough demos of melodic riffs and rhythmic loops and vocal snippets as the launchpad.
‘‘It succeeded, I think, because the Kronos players can make these very pure and romantic 19th-century concert hall sounds, but they also have the chops to play so lightly, it’s almost like air. They could play in a way that’s very fast, precise and dramatic, but they could also just… float. Not very many musicians have that much emotional range.’’
Yes, and I was relieved, to be honest. When I heard about the Landfall project, I imagined an unlistenable hour of tempestuous orchestral carryon. I pictured violins and cellos furiously sawing away, attempting to evoke wind-lashed skyscrapers, distressed citizens, relentlessly pounding waves. Just thinking about it made me feel exhausted.
‘‘Ha! You are a funny guy! But it’s not like that at all, right?’’
Right. Landfall is a finely nuanced exploration of mounting fear, survival and recovery, its moods everchanging, the stings pulverising you one minute and almost caressing you the next.
A compelling jumble of visual imagery, foggy memories and wry reflection, Anderson’s spoken-word interludes float past, rising up from the swirling centre of orchestral passages, or bobbing up unexpectedly in the calmer eddies between tracks.
The strings emulate fleeing bicycles, stalling cars, rescue helicopters flying overhead. The song titles are plainspoken yet evocative: Our Street Is A Black River, Wind Whistles Through the Dark City, The Electricity Goes Out and We Move to a Hotel, The Wind Lifted the Boats and Left Them on The Highway.
Given recent weather events, many people here in New Zealand will relate