More Talk Radio from Spain

Today's edition of Fluido rosa ( = "pink fluid"), Radio 3 Espagna's magazine about music and contemporary art features a different cut of the interview aired couple of days earlier on Radio 3, only this time with no Spanish overdubbing (and with additional parts not heard in the previous programme).

For starters Laurie performed two viola solos, then talked about 'Delusion' and about the making of 'Nothing in My Pockets', her audio diary created for French radio in 2003 (there's also an excerpt of it in the programme). Towards the end of the interview she also touched upon something that sounds, hm, quite electrifying to Mnemosyne's (and probably to some of this blog's readers') ears, namely:

"I think probably I'll put my archive on the web at some point. I'm just trying to figure out now how to do that - both the visual and the audio stuff."

(Laurie Anderson, June 2011)

Laurie's part is between 42:00 and 1:05:00 into the programme:

Ilusión o engaño?

"It's in-between."

(Laurie Anderson's answer to the question in the title, which is "illusion or deception?"

in English translation and refers to the meaning of 'Delusion')

Listen to this morning's interview with Laurie Anderson on Radio 3 Espagna (it's partly mostly :( overdubbed in Spanish):

Studiogast bei radioeins

Yesterday Laurie Anderson was the guest of radio eins' studio in Potsdam / Berlin, Germany:

• German-English interview with Laurie Anderson, radio eins (audio length: 15 mins 23 secs)

Bringing 'Delusion' to the Old Continent

Listen to and read a short interview with Laurie Anderson who prepares for her European tour with 'Delusion':

UPDATED: The 'Click' Interview

In today's edition of BBC World Service programme 'Click', Laurie Anderson talks to Colin Grant about adopting and adapting cutting-edge technology in her art, and how she can't bear the compression of mp3. Listen to the conversation in BBC's online archive (please let me know if it gets removed from there so that I upload it to the blog) - Laurie's part starts at 11:06:

• Laurie Anderson at 'Click' (BBC World Service) - April 26, 2011

UPDATE: here you can read an extraction / loose transcript of the interview.

A Fearless Afternoon of Non-Rock*

The trio of Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and John Zorn got together again for another freeform improvisation as part of a 12-hour-long benefit concert marathon for Japan at the Japan Society in NYC. The result is a one-of-a-kind blend of three strong identities from three different musical worlds; this time supported by a huge Japanese drum (and drummer).

"Lou Reed w/Laurie Anderson & John Zorn just slowly melted my face off & fed it back to me in hole where my face used to be!! I love it!"

Tweet by Quasimario

(I'm afraid this randomly shot screen capture turns out to be the only visual proof of the event... the (record of the) web stream proved to be a disaster for numerous reasons, sorry.)


I needed to chop the audio into two parts since at one point the sound engineers of the web stream thought that the static white noise / guitar feedback generated by Lou's instrument was an error so they turned the volume down in the 14th minute into the concert. (Anyway, the audio files needed to be edited at several points since the webcast kept breaking - in the end I simply cut those short gaps off... a butcher's job. :( I hope it still sounds flawless though.)

• Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and John Zorn at the Japan Society, April 09 2011 - part one (audio length: 13 mins 26 secs, file size: 18.5 MB)

• Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and John Zorn at the Japan Society, April 09 2011 - part two (audio length: 8 mins 47 secs, file size: 12.1 MB)

* a paraphrase of Lou Reed's words on their trio before their performance at the Montréal Jazz Festival in Canada, 2010

Big Science v0.1

"'Big Science' started out as an orchestra work called 'It's Cold Outside' which the American Composers Orchestra played, and this was something that I consider something of a failure. I don't really know how to make an orchestra sound and [...] I found that my ideal instrumentation is a few electronic instruments mixed with real ones which are sometimes processed, sometimes not. My favourite combination is violin and saxophone and then other things added to that.

[...]

One of the things about writing works for an orchestra is first of all [that] it's hard for an orchestra to spend much rehearsal time on new work and also you hear it a day before it's actually performed for the first time. So it kind-of is a huge shock and you realize "oh, I should have had the French horns do that" and it's really too late then.

[...]

['It's Cold Outside'] was a work for tape and orchestra. I couldn't quite leave audio tape out of it."

(Laurie Anderson, 1984)

The Sound of That Much Life

Here's another track from New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges, Colin Stetson's new album: 'Fear of the Unknown and the Blazing Sun' features Laurie Anderson's somehow detached and puzzling spoken-word contribution and Shara Worden's singing on the top of Colin Stetson's hypnotically pulsating saxophone playing - the latter was recorded live, in one take by twenty microphones placed around his instrument (the clicks and claps you hear come from Colin pushing the keys of the saxophone).

Duets on Ice in London, 2011 a. k. a. Auditive Solace for the Remote and Deprived (Plus Photos, Yay)

... a. k. a. that's what friends are for!

Files on a String now proudly presents timeiswide's recording of 'Duets on Ice' in London, performed at the Barbican Art Gallery a few days ago: prepare your ears for 2 x 12 minutes of groovy freeform improvisation onto musical bases that may be familiar from 'Delusion' (plus, I dare say, 'Homeland'). Yes, there are two recordings since the first session of 'Duets on Ice' (8 PM) was sold out so the organizers announced yet another performance at 9 PM. Considering Laurie's genuine inclination towards random playfulness, it comes as no surprise that the sessions are quite different from each other.

"[...] also, Laurie almost fell off the very tiny stage .... during the second session, the ice on her right skate broke off, and Laurie lost her balance .... [then] got her balance back. Laughed, smiled and immediately continued with now only one ice block, received an extra applause from a relieved audience ... "


"[...] and what felt as a long long time when Laurie lost her balance due to an ice-break on her right foot skate turns out to be a split second on the rec!
See, what you sense and experience as many seconds turns out to be different, on a recording!"

(excerpt from Timeiswide's review of the sessions)

• Laurie Anderson's 'Duets on Ice' in London (2011-03-03), Session One at 8PM (audio length: 13 mins 2 secs, file size: 17.9 MB)

• Laurie Anderson's 'Duets on Ice' in London (2011-03-03), Session Two at 9PM (audio length: 12 mins 5 secs, file size: 16.6 MB)

Laurie Anderson playing 'Duets on Ice'

at the Barbican Centre in London, England

photo by Rune Hellestad

(FYI: more photos of the event at Contactmusic: here and here. Also in Barbican's Facebook photo gallery!)

Laurie Anderson at ICA (London), 1990

"[...] thrills for me are discovering something while I'm working or talking to someone or suddenly realizing "oh I could see that upside down for a second" or you just suddenly get a totally different point of view of a very familiar situation. To me that's a kind of key of... if it's already familiar but I can look at it as if it's not at all."

(Laurie Anderson, 1990)

Listen to a gorgeous conversation between Laurie Anderson and Sarah Kent at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK. According to the British Library's archive, the recording was made back in November 1990, cca. a year after the release of 'Strange Angels' album, and towards the last month of the 'Empty Places' Tour which was running almost during the whole year in 1990. Consequently, it's no surprise that among the topics were the current tour and the album; Wim Wenders; learning to sing; having a lot of different voices; speed and avant-garde; senator Jesse Helms and 'Coolsville' - plus many many more. There's a particularly amusing part about Ken Nordine around 38 minutes into the record; Laurie did a hilarious imitation of his manner of speaking.

• Laurie Anderson talk at ICA (1990) (audio length: 73 mins 13 secs; listen to the stream directly in the archive of the British Library)

Filling the Garden with a Single Melody

The Singing Trees project in Basel, Switzerland is not going to be Laurie Anderson's first garden sound installation - in 2002, she filled the World Financial Center Winter Garden with an enormous sound cloud created by her violin/viola.

Read about the details of the project Sonic Garden website or listen to Laurie's introduction and an excerpt of the lovely melody directly by clicking to the following URL:

• Laurie Anderson's Winter Garden Project (audio length: 2 mins 22 secs, file size: 3.27 MB)

Laurie Anderson 101 - the Audio Edition

Two hours of Laurie Anderson's music - from two recent audio portraits from Europe:


1. First, a podcast from Spain, presented by Alex Kocic / UEMCOM Radio.

• ivoox Artist of the Week: Laurie Anderson (audio length: 59 mins 21 secs, file size: 27 MB)

Playlist:

• Transitory Life
• Born, Never Asked
• White Lily
• Coolsville
• Hiawatha
• World Without End
• Speak My Language
• Washington Street
• Beginning French
• Strange Perfumes
• O Superman
• Bright Red
• Only an Expert

2. The other one comes from Stockholm: Laurie Anderson's musical portrait as part three of Sveriges Radio P4's 'Poets, Dreamers and Visionaries' series. Along with Carin Kjellman's introduction (in beautiful melodic Swedish, of course):

• Bohemen, Drömmaren och Visionären: Laurie Anderson (audio length: 55 mins 2 secs) (click to the PLAY button in the bottom banner of the page)

Playlist:

• O Superman
• The Ouija Board
• Love Among the Sailors
• From the Air
• Cartoon Song (from United States Live)
• Baby Doll
• Thinking of You
• Big Science
• Rotowhirl
• My Eyes
• The Dream Before
• In Our Sleep
• Strange Angels
• The Beginning of Memory
• The Lake
• Flow

"Deals with the Spiritual Issues of Our Time"

"I don't actually believe in angels but I do believe that we are them."

(Laurie Anderson at Columbia University, 2011)

Listen to how Laurie Anderson navigated her way through the sometimes elusive / dim / intangible subjects of spirituality, faith and religion in a public conversation held at Columbia University on February 10, 2011 - thanks to the CU Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life website, the conversation can be downloaded as a podcast:

• 'Refiguring the Spiritual' with Laurie Anderson (audio length: 61 mins 35 secs, file size: 28.1 MB)

It's almost impossible (and unnecessary) to list all the topics touched upon - just to name a few: Melville and the Biblical symbolism of Moby Dick; silence, pain and meditation; being a spy as an artist, Laurie's pentecostal missionary grandmother, Capitalist Realism, making freeform fiction out of Egyptian architecture; John Cage, NASA's poetic projects, pressure of technology; pitch and prayer; How to Be Idle, the School of Life, what is an artist, etc. etc. etc.

You can find a bunch of great reviews of the conversation on ircpl.org by Elizabeth Kipp-Giusti, Courtney Bender, Shelly Silver, María Cristina Fernández Hall, Kali Handelman and Nora Griffin.

Twitter's archive has also got a series of enthusiastic tweets from the event by keith_wilson and saletteg. :)



(FYI: all URLs open in a new window)

The Ambience of Memory

'Egypt. Sunken Treasures', an extensive travelling exhibition of ancient Egyptian relics excavated from underwater in the area of the Nile Delta had a special extra feature in Italy: the musical / sound environment of the exhibition in Veneria was provided by Laurie Anderson.

Watch the video and enjoy the unique atmosphere supported by a hypnotic instrumental version of 'The Beginning of Memory' (at 0:53):

Thanks to Viki for the URL!

Homecoming #2

"... and then, ['Delusion' is about] the stories you tell yourself about to find meaning in what you're doing, who you are, the way you define yourself. And those are delusional, as we all know. But we need them because otherwise things fall apart without stories."

(Laurie Anderson, January 2011)

WBEZ (Chicagoan radio) host Alison Cuddy talked with Laurie Anderson about the meaning of the word 'Delusion'; singing about the present in 2001: performing 'O Superman' on 9/11 in Chicago; Laurie getting sick of her own voice (wat!); her love-hate relationship with technology; mothers and (failed) expectations; challenge and experimentation: working at McDonald's, and seeing Chicago with the eyes of a child.

Messiness and Chaos (and a Bunch of Other Things, Too)

"I was originally a sculptor and I love things that just don't fit into boxes. I'm really happy when I see that things don't fit."

(Laurie Anderson, October 2010)

KUSF Radio (San Francisco) recently aired a conversation between Laurie Anderson and radio DJ Bryan Chandler, originally recorded in October 2010. Now you can listen to the whole two-hour-long Laurie Anderson Special in KUSF Radio's online archive - with a detailed introduction to Laurie's career by Bryan Chandle.



If you are interested in only the interview, here it is, cut into three parts - I edited the songs out and did some noise reduction on the audio:

• Bryan Chandler's interview with Laurie Anderson on KUSF - Part One (audio length: 6 mins 31 secs, file size: 8.96 MB)

• Bryan Chandler's interview with Laurie Anderson on KUSF - Part Two (audio length: 5 mins 59 secs, file size: 8.24 MB)

• Bryan Chandler's interview with Laurie Anderson on KUSF - Part Three (audio length: 7 mins 44 secs, file size: 10.6 MB)

(Impatient? Here's some tags for you: 'Homeland', workaholism, Karl Marx, 'Transitory Life', 'Delusion', progress, old hard drives and altitude, messiness and chaos, wedding, yawning, lip-synching, TV-B-Gone, food porn, Ken Nordine - who could wish for more.)


FYI: the list of songs that were played:

Flow
Let X = X
It Tango
Only an Expert remix
Sharkey's Day
Transitory Life
O Superman
Is Anybody Home
Strange Perfumes

Another Day in America
Sharkey's Night
Falling
Only an Expert
Accompanied by Ghosts
Difficult Listening Hour
The Ugly One with the Jewels

Double Treat

"The time in 'Flow' is very odd - instead of bars, you'll wait seven beats until the next phrase and it's kind of, "Woah, what time signature is that in." It's in the time signature of regret or something, sort of flowing."

(Laurie Anderson on her Grammy-nominated violin piece 'Flow')

1. Listen to Mike Ragogna's interview with Laurie Anderson, recorded from KRUU-FM (broadcasting from Fairfield, Iowa):

• part one (audio length: 13 mins 57 secs, file size: 19.2 MB)

• part two (audio length: 14 mins 21 secs, file size: 19.7 MB)

[note: songs edited out]


2. Read the transcript in the Huffington Post.

Laurie at AndrewAndrew Again

If you've ever wondered if Laurie Anderson is a fan of any mainstream hip hop / pop song, the answer is here for ya; hidden in the following hilarious post-Hanukkah / pre-Christmas chat between Laurie and AndrewAndrew on East Village Radio.


You can listen to the whole conversation in one on EVRadio's website, or in three parts, cut / edited by Mnemosyne:



PART ONE

• Laurie Anderson at AndrewAndrew, Dec 21st, 2010 - part one (audio length: 14 mins 06 secs, file size: 19.4 MB)

Part one's topics: colored "photographs" from outer space, folding chairs and architecture (São Paulo, Matthew Barney, male architects and phallic symbols, Frank Gehry, Manhattan's 1930s quaintness, etc). A super fun part of the chat was the following:

AA: What'd they say about Lincoln Center? They said it was like a gas station, a fancy gas station.

LA: They said it was something that Mussolini ordered over the phone.

AA: [laughter] Oh, that's fantastic. Mussolini ordered over the phone.

LA: Yeah. Gimme, er, something kind-of boxy and white and, I don't know, glitzy, little bit of sparkles...

[...]

AA: It's sort of fascist, when you look at the columns, and the symmetric...

LA: I know, yes, it is.

AA: It's like an Apple store almost.

[...]

LA: You are right that Lincoln Center materials are very Mac-like. They're really smooth and slippery, and kind-of little bit of rounded...

AA: It's seductive... and also stand-offish.

LA: Yeah. Exactly.

AA: There's something in that Mac stores are beautiful, they're simple, and you wanna be a part of this culture but you know you're not a part of that culture.

LA: Right. You're wearing the wrong clothes for that.

AA: Yes. It's aspirational. It's kinda like a night club. Like, "no-no, let me in, I'm cool".

PART TWO

• Laurie Anderson at AndrewAndrew, Dec 21st, 2010 - part two (audio length: 13 mins 09 secs, file size: 18.1 MB)

Topics of part two: Laurie's first time of getting a non-geek Grammy nomination (i. e. not for producing / engineering an album / song), the chair and the projections in 'Delusion', Himalayan art at Rubin Museum, talking about nothing with Charles Seife, multiple universes and the Quantum Suicide Test, Candide, the most photographed barn in the world (see Don Delillo's 'White Noise'), top popes / co-popes / Poperdose / The Sane Pope / "maybe we're all exactly the same pope"... and 'Flow', Laurie's Grammy-nominated violin piece:

AA: We're gonna play 'Flow', it's off of 'Homeland'.

LA: It's on 'Homeland'. Didn't come off of it. It's still on it.

AA: And this is the particular track... although the whole album is quite good.

LA: [in mock relief] Thank you. It's the afterthought track. I wasn't gonna put that on [the album]... It's kind-of... the encore. It's a quizzical thing. It's gonna be in the new Julian Schnabel film a lot. It's called 'Miral'. It's a movie about four generations of female Palestinian terrorists. Really difficult... fantastic. Really brave movie... tough topic.

PART THREE

• Laurie Anderson at AndrewAndrew, Dec 21st, 2010 - part three (audio length: 17 mins 10 secs, file size: 23.6 MB)

Topics in part three: 'Ice Ice Baby', the Secret Vatican Disco, beat poets, alternatives to Wal-Mart, 'Capitalist Realism', 'Baader-Meinhof Komplex' and terrorists today, Bill Ayers...

LA: A lot of underground people and a lot of radicals from the Sixties and Seventies really did have this idea of freedom and of freeing people and making [the world] a better place. This was not Bin Laden who's just a kind of a madman, really, and somebody whose ideal is not freedom. Ours is. I mean, we're from the Western side of the world, we come from the Greeks, they invented a lot of stuff and we thought those were some really great ideals, like, the individual should be free, so this place is built on [those ideals]. But you wouldn't know it now. You wouldn't recognize it now. It's scary.

... plus Lolabelle's Christmas record, and Laurie's concert for dogs in Sydney. Hint: you can get the record on request via Dogrelations' contact form!

I in U in the 'Metropolis'

"[...] To tell a story: this is really my art form, not technology."

(Laurie Anderson)

Brazilian cultural tv show 'Metropolis' featuring I in U / Eu em Tu:

Since the the Portuguese overdub was mixed to the left side and Laurie's voice on the right side in the stereo sound, I luckily managed to "extract" her voice and made a collage of the interview excerpts that had been made it o the show. They are sometimes disjointed, sometimes without end of sentences but, at least, listenable. She talks about how she feels being called a performance artist; making the paintings for the exhibition; Duets on Ice, Lou Reed's help in the making process of 'Homeland', Bob Dylan and politics:

• Laurie Anderson interview excerpts in 'Metropolis', 2010 (audio length: 1 min 29 secs, file size: 1.3 MB)

Another Unconventional Reading

What a coincidence: I have just found another recording of a public reading by Laurie Anderson - this time from the PEN event 2004 State of Emergency: Unconventional Readings. So, Dearreader, enjoy this old/new eight-minute-long treat, a free podcast from the PEN archive:

• David Hickey's 'My Weimar' from Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, read by Laurie Anderson (2004) (audio length: 8 mins 15 secs, file size: 7.6 MB)