"Here We Go", She Said (and She Meant It Literally)

"From a program recorded on September 14, 1981, Charles Amirkhanian gets a demonstration of the Eventide Clockworks Harmonizer from Laurie Anderson. The Harmonizer is the piece of equipment that Anderson has used, with such great effect, to lower the pitch of her voice in real time, during her concerts", says the description of Ode To Gravity's September 14, 1981 issue at archive.org.

Before that, the program also features Fenway Bergamot's first ever public appearance at the Nova Convention in 1978 (at that time he was just "a pompous blowhard" (quote from L. A.)). The recording, titled 'Song from America on the Move', a two-part performance piece by Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, can be found on the LP 'The Dial-A-Poem Poets: The Nova Convention'; Laurie's part was later titled as 'The Language of the Future' (in 'United States Live I-IV.').

• 00:45 - 07:02 The Language of the Future 

• 07:03 - 09:23 interview

Tape-bow Violin, v2.0

When a Laurie Anderson lecture proves seminal...


Young St. Louisian composer and musician David MacDonald, having gotten inspired by Laurie Anderson's tape-bow violin as an undergraduate student some years before, has now created the Sampolin, the tape-bow violin's digital version.

The Sampolin has got the shape of an analogue violin but it's filled inside with electronics and it's got some extra knobs and buttons.

Similarly to the original, a certain short sample of sound is assigned to the bow: the sample 'starts' at one end, and it 'ends' at the other end of the bow. If the bow touches the the string on the Sampolin, the string tells the computer which part of the bow is touching it, so the computer will tell which part of the sample to be played. By pushing the buttons aligned on the neck, the player can easily switch between the samples he wants to play. Plus, by turning the tuners in the pegbox, instead of fine-tuning the strings, the player can add extra effects to the raw sound, for example an additional musical tone that is extracted from the original sample.

Watch David's introduction of the Sampolin:

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's Territory

A recent documentary on Laurie Anderson in Portuguese (luckily, the interview is subtitled) - click to the picture to watch the video (it will open in a new window):

Lolabelle goes solo

Left paw, right paw, treat? Sit. Right paw. Woof! Alright. Woof! Right paw. Treat? No. Let's try it one octave lower... Two octaves. Treat, pretty please?

Sit. Left paw. Can't feel the vibe. Now... yeah, that's better. Woof! Treat? No? Ok, now change the chord. Dominant note. Let's descend to D minor. Woof!

Then and Now #5: the Blocks of Ice

1975: 'Duets on Ice' in Genova, Italy. Laurie Anderson and two Italian men on different levels of sociability.

Photo by Bob Bielecki

2005: Laurie Anderson opens her exhibition 'The Record of Time' at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland.

Photo source: Profimedia

"I love duets so I made a violin that plays by itself, so that I could play duets with it live. This combination of live and pre-recorded has been basic to my work for ever. This violin was played in five different places around New York. It was an endless cassette loop. Like many minimal pieces, it would start and yards and yards of material would go by and then it would stop, it didn't have a narrative structure typical to music, that's why it was minimalism."

"I used for this timing mechanism, for this endless piece of music a pair of ice-skates which I wore with their blades frozen into blocks of ice. I played this piece - endless loop - until the ice melted and I lost my balance and the concert was over. So, there I was, on this hot summer street of New York, wearing these ice-skates that were sort of gradually wobbling and then my ankles would splay out and the concert would be over and people were like "what's that?". But, for me, it had the social aspect of an audience which I really did enjoy as an artist because my question is always: who are you talking to? Who's your audience? Who are you making this for? History? Other artists? Critics? Your friends? General public? Box office? Who?"

(Laurie Anderson, on her Self-Playing Violin,

part of the MoMA's collection in New York)

If you go to the MoMA collection's website, you can listen to Laurie Anderson describe her Self-Playing Violin (1974) and 'Duets on Ice'.

'Only an Expert' Reshaped

Now here's a slightly enhanced version of Laurie Anderson's live performance of 'Only an Expert', aired today on NPR's World Café show:

- cut out two (or three) misspelled / blurred parts that were so flawlessly fixed after they'd been muffed at first
- overall volume leveled off then normalized
- background hiss removed

... I hope this kind of alteration still does not fall into the getting-the-air-out-of-the-record category.

• Only an Expert (The Oil Spill Version) live at NPR's World Café (audio length: 6 mins 49 secs, file size: 9.38 MB)

I have to say I prefer this low-key variant of 'Only an Expert' to the album version... and the cynicism level of Laurie's voice really kicks a$$.

The Amazing Future of Sounds

"I think there’ll be really amazing acoustical spaces to listen to things in, and the sound replication will be hyper-real as well."

Read more about what Laurie Anderson predicts about the sounds of the future, her opinion about Facebook and what qualities she treasures in another artists in this gorgeous article in Smithsonian by Jamie Katz.

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.

AnOther article to read

A worth-to-read article in AnOther Magazine's New York Moment Series by Derek Peck, along with interesting photos of Laurie's studio, gives some insight into Laurie Anderson's sonic playground and the Singing Trees project she's working on at the moment.

(photo by Derek Peck / Another Magazine)

(It's a Pro Tools software in one of the photos, right?)