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Laurie Anderson Details How Hurricane Sandy & Loss Influenced Her New Album & Book
Laurie Anderson
In conversation about Hurricane Sandy, the subject of her new album with Kronos Quartet, Landfall (out
Feb. 16), New York-based violinist and performance artist Laurie
Anderson shares two anecdotes. One is about taking her dog out to
urinate during the storm, and seeing how “his little dog-brain was kind
of blown” by the scene. The other details a caper perpetrated by the
musician and her late husband, Lou Reed.
“We tried to sandbag our
street,” remembers Anderson over the phone from an artists’ colony in
California. “We didn’t have any sandbags in our building. We saw that
across the street, they had a lot of ’em, but their building had already
flooded. So we ran over and got their sandbags. [laughs] But they were
okay with that; we saved our building that way.”
Those are the good memories. As explained in the Landfall
spoken-word track “Everything Is Floating”—and implied by the tense
strings and foreboding electronic beats that make up the LP—Sandy stole a
lot more than sandbags from Anderson; “old keyboards,” “props from old
performances,” and “countless papers and books” were reduced to “junk.”
But Anderson’s past is alive and well in her other new release this
month, All the Things I Lost in the Flood (out now), a
retrospective book covering projects from throughout her career. Paired
together, Anderson’s February 2018 offerings tell a complete story, one
of disappearance and accomplishment, absence and manifestation.
The music Anderson composed for herself and Kronos—the string quartet behind the soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream—is
autobiographical, with song titles like “The Electricity Goes Out and
We Move to a Hotel” and “Riding Bicycles Through the Muddy Streets.” An
especially poignant moment comes shortly after she lists the possessions
that have been irreparably damaged: “And I thought, ‘How beautiful. How
magic. And how catastrophic.’” The honesty in that statement—the
ability to see it from both angles—is hard to shake.
“Some of the best writing that I know has that duality in it,” says
Anderson. “I suppose there’s really beautiful, ecstatic poetry and
stuff. But unless it has something that’s heart-rippingly sad in it,
too, I kind of don’t get it. [laughs] I really love the mixture.”
The
album’s centerpiece is the eerie “Nothing Left But Their Names,” which
lasts for nearly ten minutes and finds Anderson musing on topics
seemingly unrelated to Sandy, like extinct animal species and the Hebrew
letter alef. More than just her words, Anderson’s voice stands out
here, too—she pitches it down, taking on a persona nicknamed “Fenway
Bergamot.”
“It was a voice that I invented originally as something
called ‘The Voice of Authority,’ and it was meant to get out of my own
point of view more often, and be able to see things from another point
of view, which works really well,” explains Anderson. “And if you have a
voice that’s [speaks in a high-pitched voice] ‘Yeah, like this’ or
[speaks in a low-pitched voice] ‘Like that,’ you use different words and
talk about different things. So that was why I did it, to escape my own
perspective, largely.”
Anderson’s wholly unique viewpoint,
though, is what has propelled her through five decades of experimental
art, a journey that somehow includes both a Moby-Dick opera and musical performances for an intended audience of dogs. All the Things I Lost in the Flood
explores those projects and more through essays and photographs,
presenting Anderson’s career as a single, eccentric piece of music in
many movements. Looking back on her career during the making of the
book, Anderson was able to see how certain branches of herself had grown
longer over time.
“I kept repeating myself,” says Anderson. “I
kept thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a brand-new idea.’ For example, a lot of
these floor pieces that I did. There’s a film called Sidewalk
that’s on the floor, or projected on the floor, and has certain ways
that it works with time. And I realized, ‘Wait a second. I did that in
1971,’ in something called Note Tone, about backwards imagery. And it
wasn’t like, I thought, ‘Wow, it’s all the same.’ I’m unconsciously
building on some of these ideas. So, that was exciting to me to
realize.”
Another piece discussed in the book, a 1996 installation
called The Parrot, contains a notion that could also be seen as a motif
in Anderson’s work: “The purpose of art is to provide what life
cannot.” The line feels almost like a slogan, or mission statement for
Anderson.
“[Art] can jolt you into an emotional state very
quickly, and sometimes in your life, you don’t realize that that’s
happening,” says Anderson. “Let’s say you’ve just had a disastrous
breakup, and it’s mixed up with a lot of contradictory feelings about
it, with other conversations. And then you hear a song that’s so purely
about loss that you just go, ‘Oh my god, that’s exactly how I feel.’ And
so I think it can distill certain things that maybe you don’t do in
your daily life. That you, for a million reasons, you don’t let yourself
feel those things. But then a song or a painting or something can go,
‘This is how you feel.’ And you’re like, ‘Ooh, you’re right.’ [laughs]
‘That is exactly how I feel.’”
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