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):

Meanwhile, on the GRIT...

"I would love "explorer" but on my passport it just says "artist". [...] I try to just be a good journalist, really, and look at what's going on. [...] I'm a storyteller. I'm not tapdancing around, I don't do that. Maybe I'm fooling myself. Hm..."

(Laurie Anderson's attempts of self-description to Laura Flanders, 2011)

Nostalgia, techno humiliation, art and politics, alter-egos as ways of escape, Laurie Anderson's saddest musical experience and many-many more in Laura Flanders' recent interview on GRIT tv:

P. S.: Hm. Looks like the original Talking Stick is still in the hands of Homeland Security.

Current State of Mind of an Universalkünstlerin*

"Today I'm working on a short little poem that I've been thinking about, I have a drawing to finish, and I have a little projection work. This is the kind of hell my life is: doesn't one piece relate to the other one that much. I mean maybe that's great but sometimes it feels little disconnecting. On the other hand, that's just the way things are."


"Do I think art can change the world? I don't have any idea. Politicians can change politics - so can artists? I don't know. I'm a little bit pessimistic at the moment, to tell you the truth."


"[...] "The triumph of capitalism, here it is. Okay. One thing to do: get famous, get rich. That's the game. Good luck and see you later." - That's really harsh, and it's in every field in many ways. Artists are the same thing: we are encouraged to compete rather than to cooperate. And that's not a kind of world I dream of living in."


"I'm a journalist at heart. I like to try to see how things really work-- not make it up, not fantasize. That's a very hard thing to tell a story that is true. It's easy to find a good punchline. But everybody knows that most punchlines smell a little bad... they're clever, okay, but if you really try to tell a story: our lives are so messy. They don't have good punchlines, they don't have ways that they end very neatly. I think a lot of people, myself included, would like to find a way to see the world really clearly, not to somebody's punchline or somebody's story but really how do other people do it."

(Four examples of Laurie Anderson's current state of mind, mid April 2011)

Laurie Anderson @ Canal Street, April 2011

Photo by Christian Lehner

Austrian radio FM4 has recently aired Christian Lehner's interview with Laurie Anderson on the occasion of Laurie's upcoming live appearance at the Donaufestival in Krems-an-der-Donau, Austria: on the 5th of May 2011 she will perform 'Transitory Life', a retrospective collection of her past stories.

The conversation touched on subjects like New York City in the 1970s vs. 2010s, record charts, art and politics, the making process of the 'Homeland' album, the linguistics behind its title, the current state of mind of New York City, last year's concert for dogs in Sydney and the origins of 'O Superman' and 'Another Day in America'.

The Laurie Anderson Spezialstunde** was part of 'New York State of Mind', FM4's interview series "on individuals who set up the Big Apple a little crown". More info on the conversation with the Universalkünstlerin (basically the German translation of the interview) and some photos of the session can be found here.

You can listen to the whole programme in FM4's online archive until the 4th of May:

• New York State of Mind, Issue #3: Laurie Anderson (audio length: 54 mins 8 secs, file size: 49.5 MB)

(FYI: don't worry if you missed the programme in the online archive: stay tuned for a stripped-down-and-cut-and-edited version of the interview here.)




* universal artist
** special hour

The (Late) Night America Got Its Insanity Fix

A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a wo... whatevs. Laurie Anderson is the master of confusion. Performing as her male alter-ego Fenway Bergamot on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night (February 24, 2011), (s)he stirred a tidal wave of WTF among the viewers of the show which, for a few hours, sent the term "Laurie Anderson" among America's top trending topics on Twitter.

Super wicked creepy awesomeness - or just 'Another Day in America':

If you are interested what people thought about Fenway Bergamot, check these out:

• Prefixmag's review of the performance
• Tweets posted during and after the performance, collected by Mnemosyne (some seriously hilarious genuine reactions - explicit language!)

Strange Perfumes in Budapest

"My mother is cold and my father is dead
I can only see him in the back of my own head."

(excerpt from 'Strange Perfumes' live version, 2007

music and lyrics by Laurie Anderson)

OMG, this is a mesmerizing live version of 'Strange Perfumes' - recorded in Budapest, Hungary, June 2007. It's got totally different lyrics from the album version, e. g. it mentions names from a long lost past - hear it for yourself.

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.

Apocalyptic Angel in the Palace of Arts

"We do try to help each other. Lou has helped me a lot. Particularly in this show, Homeland - he has come to a lot of rehearsals and made some really great suggestions to the musicians. He's really-really good at that. I really am listening. I'm really listening. Because he knows me... totally."

(Laurie Anderson on her then-husband-to-be, 2007)

Hungarian national tv (MTV - not that one, of course) has made an interview with Laurie Anderson in June 2007, during her stay in Budapest. She was talking about the 'Homeland' concerts, the importance of improvising, mental states and Lou Reed. (The epitheton ornans in the title is taken from a really great Hungarian essay by J. A. Tillmann.)

(Erm.... Mnemosyne is kinda in a spot since the article has been written in such elaborate Hungarian that Google Translator simply gives it up half of the time...)

Fenway Bergamot Sleeveface

Fenway Bergamot by Scarydan

... priceless! :) Along with Dan's personal reaction to 'Homeland'.

Grammy Nomination 2011

Nominees for Grammy 2011, Best Pop Instrumental Performance:

• "Flow" by Laurie Anderson ('Homeland', 2010)
• "Nessun Dorma" by Jeff Beck
• "No Mystery" by Stanley Clarke
• "Orchestral Intro" by Gorillaz
• "Sleepwalk" by The Brian Setzer Orchestra

!!!

Making Something Is Really *Daring*

Australian writer / blogger Chris Boyd's interview with Laurie Anderson in three parts, on - amongst others - disembodiment, angels, elephants, the 'Homeland' performances as "back pocket shows" and the beauty of being an artist:

1. "The lost art of conversation..."
2. Homeland
3. "when people say 'I know exactly what you're talking about!"

(Note: for me, the order of the interview parts somehow seems to have been reversed, that's why I put "part three" into the first place and so on.)

"Bafflingly Powerful Images"

Three random reviews of 'Homeland' from the recent past:

• Laurie Anderson Wants to Know Who You're Working for - how Laurie turned two of her favourite books about work into an album years later

• Making Contact - a lengthy description of Fenway Bergamot and a few words on the making process of 'Homeland' at Express Night Out

• "akin to walking around with near-sightedness all your life and then being granted a pair of corrective lenses" - Emmanuel Hapsis at KQED Arts is thrilled by the album

A Review Candy

... a short but brilliant one: Greil Marcus featuring his review of 'Homeland' at the first place in his monthly column Real Life Rock Top Ten in the September 2010 issue of The Believer Magazine. The review focuses especially on an "unexpected pop song" ('Only an Expert') and the "soft-spoken jeremiad" called 'Another Day in America'.

(The only thing Mnemosyne begs to differ with Greil Marcus' article is that, in her humble opinion, 'The Ugly One...' Laurie Anderson's voice is one big raised eyebrow: just think of the pinpoint portrait of 'The Salesman' or her adventures in Israel and at various airport security checkpoints around Europe during the Gulf War in 'The Cultural Ambassador' - just to mention only the pieces that featured the Voice of Authority. However, all in all, she thinks it's pretty pointless to highlight any particular track of the album.)

Hören ist wissen.

German radio station Deutschlandfunk featured a Laurie Anderson portrait by Christiane Rebmann on the 16th of August, 2010: a collage of excerpts from an interview made in Hamburg during this year's soccer world cup, plus songs from 'Homeland'. Caution: German voice-over. (But hopefully some of you, who can be silent in four (five, six, seven...) languages, will appreciate it.)

• Deutschlandfunk's Laurie Anderson Portrait, Part One (audio length: 10 mins 42 secs, file size: 14.7 MB): 50% baseball stadium, 50% Proust, air and the imperfections in 'Homeland', stories that don't have a simple solution, the heavy quotation marks around 'Homeland', untrue but good stories, the polemic white rap named 'Only an Expert'...

• Deutschlandfunk's Laurie Anderson Portrait, Part Two (audio length: 8 mins 42 secs, file size: 11.9 MB): favourite Saturday clothes and wedding ceremonies, Lolabelle's Jerry Lee Lewis technique, the multitasking human mind, the most stupid e-mail that Laurie received in the last 24 hours, sleeping self turning legal age... just the usual Laurie Anderson stuff ;)

jeffboule FTW

Two excellent AND detailed reviews from Jeff Boule at Looney Tunes CD's, make me wanna meet the guy:

• Homeland - track-by-track review of the album

• Another Day in America - the World Café Live concert - with an extra description of Ron Burger's mellotron-type instrument Orchestron.

The American Noise Interview

An in-depth interview on 'Homeland' by Stephen M. Deusner: Fenway Bergamot, the story of the lark, books on economy, the bass on Homeland and many, many more.

The 'Homeland' Zoo

Getting absorbed in the world of Laurie Anderson's 'Homeland' led me to the following fun revelation: that animals appearing in various aspects of the album almost could fill a zoo.


Take, for example, The Beginning of Memory, with the billions and billions of songbirds circling around in the sky, and the lark, whose father dies one day, and whose decision to bury the corpse in her own head marks the beginning of memory.


There's one more bird - another songbird - in 'Homeland': the robin that sings the song of long lost love in Strange Perfumes. Oh, and let's not forget the sky-flying birds at the beginning of Thinking of You.


Some mammals also pop up here and there throughout the album: right at the start, Transitory Life's mouse who realizes that he's in a trap, and, from then on, he is literally condemned to death. [Not really a vision for sore eyes.] And, of course, Lolabelle, who leaves her mark on Bodies in Motion by her barking and playing the piano in her sweet, eccentric way.


Then there's Only an Expert that not only mentions the Pet Solution, but its updated lyrics also contain fish poisoned by, and ducks and dolphins completely coated with oil that spilled out into the ocean.


... plus a bonus from Mambo and Bling (the first vinyl of 'Homeland'):

"[...] the classic problem calculating your odds for accidents that might happen. Like, you have more chance, for example, getting hit and killed in a car crash than dying in a plane crash. But things keep changing, so you have to keep re-calculating the odds and updating the list. You you have to keep adding things like [...] being crushed by a crane falling onto your building. And you have to keep crossing other things off the list, like [...] getting trampled by hordes of horses"

"Ghosts" Accompanying, Part One

Warning: this is going to be a pointless rambling on some of the "ghosts" that are haunting on various tracks of 'Homeland'.

Laurie Anderson has stated a few times during interviews that, during the construction process of Homeland, she'd taken fragments from certain songs and built them into others. Being an avid audio candy hunter myself, it was no surprise that soon I caught myself listening to certain segments of songs over and over and trying to find out what those unfitting-or-familiar-at-first-sight/hearing fragments appeared at certain points of the songs and why. Now I'm trying to enumerate some of the more obvious ones.


1. The Timeless Melody

One of the recurring fragments is the melody sung by Aidysmaa Koshkendey, the female singer of the Tuvan throat-singing group Chirgilchin. Both 'Transitory Life' and 'The Beginning of Memory' begin with the same tune. During the former track, Aidysmaa's singing continues with a second and third line, escalating the frenzy of the hair-raising beginning of 'Homeland' even further. The third line, though less prominently featured than in 'Transitory Life', re-appears at the end of both verses of 'The Beginning of Memory', perfectly nestling into the timeless texture of the song.


2. The Bell of Concentration

The next element is the bell tolling that can be heard twice during the first half of 'My Right Eye' and numerous times throughout the whole track of 'Only an Expert'. Its use in the latter song still needs some further explanation to me (maybe it's the mockery of experts' constant calling of attention to themselves). If one considers the first verse of 'My Right Eye' as some kind of Buddhist exercise,

Concentration. Empty your mind.
Let the rest of the world go by.
Hold your breath. Hold your breath. Close your eyes.

the bell toll leads to another story that Laurie tells in 'Delusion'. It's a practice of concentration: you hear a chime clinging and you have to follow the sound with your mind, and then there's a second cling of the chime but this time your mind shouldn't follow it.

UPDATE: The bell also echoes in 'Falling', the restful counterpart of its predecessor, 'Only an Expert' - similarly to 'My Right Eye', it rings during the part of introversion: "[...] I fall asleep".


3. The Ghost of Dark Times

The ending of 'The Lake' required numerous listenings until I found out what the "ghost" whispered (i. e. Laurie's voice burdened heavily by filters and FXs). The rhythm of the recital sounded too familiar to me but, since my auditory comprehension skills are desperately weak, it took a fairly long time to recognize that the "whispering" is, in fact, the last verse of the previous track, 'Dark Time in the Revolution':

And you thought there were things
That had disappeared forever
Things from the Middle Ages
Beheadings and hangings
And people in cages
And suddenly they were everywhere
And suddenly they’re alright
Welcome to, welcome to,
welcome to the American night.

... OK, now... what the WHAT? Lines like these, stuck at the end of the most intimate, most moving, most peaceful song on the album? How so? Was it Laurie's intention to posteriorly disguise the intimacy of the song? This one really puzzles me. (If you are reading this and have a better solution, feel free to e-mail me.)

(To be continued. Sometime.)

SonicScoop article

An article full of technical details on the building / engineering of Homeland. Softwares, hardwares, filters, rhythmic riffs, monitoring, etc. Only for the interested.

Perfect in Their Own Way

Just a lovely live version of 'Strange Perfumes' along with a hypnotizing drumline (which is lurking on the album version, too, but it's almost entirely inaudible... what a pity):

Kojo Nnamdi interview

Laurie Anderson was the guest at the Kojo Nnamdi Show on American University Radio WAMU on July 15, 2010. She talked about her first 'artistic' job (i. e. teaching Egyptian art history and making up the gaps in her memory by freeform storytelling), swinging between politics and poetry, the evolution of 'Homeland' from live performance into studio album, audio drag, playing and getting booed Montréal Jazz Festival, and then she was answering various listeners' questions posed via telephone and the show's online forum, for example providing us with a how-to on making a proper drum suit. Yay!!! And thanks for answering my question, Laurie. :)

• Listen to the first half of the show here (audio length: 14 mins 55 secs, file size: 20.5 MB)

• Listen to the second half of the show here (audio length: 12 mins 49 secs, file size: 17.6 MB)