May 27, 2011

When the Musician Meets the Explorer


"For me, art is about being able to see something or hear something in a really concentrated, focused way. It's not the stuff you put into museums. [...] To me, art is about being able to pay attention to the ocean sound that we live in, to start with, and the incredible things that we're seeing. And artists draw your attention to those things."
(Laurie Anderson at the Explorers Club in NYC, April 2011)


The Explorers Club uploaded their video of 'Music & Exploration – The Avant-garde Meets Exploration', a conversation between Laurie Anderson and David Rothenberg, recorded on April 25th, 2011:




The topics of the discussion were (amongst others): why animals sing, Laurie's concert for dogs in Sydney, researching dolphins' "talk", Lolabelle's illness and music therapy (alas, she has recently passed away :( ), the Estuarium ("it's great taking a dog to a fish museum" - L. A.), Laurie's rage against mp3 ("a horrible solution [for compressing audio data], crushing music to nothing"), a moving story about parrots' musical memory in a Vietnamese village; regret, image interpretation and self-expression - and many more.