RhoDeo 1328 Aetix

Hello, enjoyed some downtime, reading a book, relaxing in the garden and hardly any digital pressures, hmm so when i came back home tonight first thing was getting this post into shape, fortunately i already planned which lady would take the spotlight, another New Yorker married to a well known rockstar, I'm talking Mrs Lou Reed of cause. Now before all that came about she had started her own music career in the early seventies, deemed avant garde but then aged 34 lightning struck and she was propelled into the spotlight, not something her early arty snob clique appreciated much, they just didn't want any rif raf at her performances. Today you can enjoy her eighties work in your underpants should you feel like it.   ......N'Joy

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After briefly entering the mainstream pop radar in 1981 with her lone hit "O Superman," Laurie Anderson enjoyed a public visibility greater than virtually any other avant-garde figure of her era. Her infrequent forays into rock aside, Anderson nevertheless remained firmly grounded within the realm of performance art, her ambitious multimedia projects encompassing not only music but also film, visual projections, dance, and -- most importantly -- spoken and written language, the cornerstone of all of her work. Born in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois on June 5, 1947, she studied violin as a teen; relocating to New York City at age 20, she later attended Barnard College, graduating with a B.A. in art history in 1969. After earning an M.F.A. in sculpture from Columbia University in 1972, Anderson taught art history and Egyptian architecture at City College; she mounted her first public performances a year later.

 By 1976, Anderson was regularly mounting performances in museums, concert halls, and art festivals throughout North America and Europe; claiming to base all of her projects on the power of words and language, her work also emphasized visual imagery and cutting-edge technology, with pieces like 1980's Born, Never Asked, written for both orchestra and electronics. A year later, Anderson recorded "O Superman" for the tiny New York label 110 Records; an 11-minute single built around electronic drones and featuring opaque lyrics half-spoken and half-sung (in a voice sometimes electronically treated); this most unlikely hit became a smash in Britain, where it reached the number two spot on the national pop charts. Warner Bros. soon signed Anderson to record a full-length LP, and in 1982,she issued Big Science, a work drawn from a much larger project, the seven-hour multi-media performance United States.

 With 1984's Mister Heartbreak, Anderson produced her most overtly pop-oriented work, teaming with artists including Peter Gabriel and Adrian Belew; the end result even reached the American Top 100. That same year, she also issued United States Live, a recorded document of the complete performance spread across a five-LP set. Anderson's next project, Home of the Brave, was a concert film; a year later, she also scored the Jonathan Demme/Spalding Gray film Swimming to Cambodia. A proper studio album, Strange Angels, did not follow until 1989; the next several years were devoted to performance tours, including 1990's Empty Places, 1991's Voices from the Beyond, and 1993's Stories from the Nerve Bible. In 1994, Anderson teamed with producer Brian Eno for Bright Red, also featuring her boyfriend Lou Reed; the following year she released the LP The Ugly One with Jewels as well as Puppet Motel, a CD-R confirming her ongoing interest in the latest technology. In 2001, Anderson issued Life On A String which contained songs from her large musical theater pieces Moby Dick and Strange Angels. In 2001, two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Ms. Anderson recorded a live album at Town Hall, New York City (on its cover werre the poignantwords "New York City, September 19-20, 2001." It was released as Live At Town Hall NYC in 2002. Ms. Anderson continued her appearance schedule but didn't record for another seven years when she began working on Homeland, which was released by Nonesuch in 2010. By that time she had been married to Lou Reed for 2 years ( apparently marrying when your over sixty isn't bourgeois )

Anderson has invented several experimental musical instruments that she has used in her recordings and performances. Like the tape-bow violin created by Laurie Anderson in 1977. It uses recorded magnetic tape in place of the traditional horsehair in the bow, and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. Anderson has updated and modified this device over the years.

Also the talking stick a 6-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller. It was used in the Moby-Dick tour in 1999–2000. She described it in program notes as follows: the Talking Stick is a new instrument that I designed in collaboration with a team from Interval Research and Bob Bielecki. It is a wireless instrument that can access and replicate any sound. It works on the principle of granular synthesis.

A recurring motif in Anderson's work is the use of a voice filter which deepens her voice into a masculine register, a technique which Anderson has referred to as "audio drag". Anderson has long used the resulting character in her work as a "voice of authority" or conscience, although she later decided that he had lost much of his authority and instead began utilizing the voice to provide historical or sociopolitical commentary.

Anderson was awarded the 2007 Gish Prize for her "outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life. Nice epitath

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There was a backlash against Laurie Anderson in "serious" musical and artistic circles after the completely unexpected mainstream commercial success of her debut album, Big Science. (The eight-plus-minute single "O Superman" was a chart hit in England, unbelievably enough.) A fair listen to Big Science leaves the impression that jealousy must have been at the root of the reception because Big Science is in no way a commercial sellout. A thoughtful and often hilariously funny collection of songs from Anderson's work in progress, United States I-IV, Big Science works both as a preview of the larger work and on its own merits. Opening with the hypnotic art rock of "From the Air," in which an airline pilot casually mentions that he's a caveman to a cyclical melody played in unison by a three-part reeds section, and the strangely beautiful title track, which must feature the most deadpan yodeling ever, the album dispenses witty one-liners, perceptive social commentary (the subtext of the album concerns Anderson's own suburban upbringing, which she views with more of a bemused fondness than the tiresome irony that many brought to the subject), and a surprisingly impressive sense of melody for someone who was until recently a strictly visual artist. For example, the marimba and handclap-led closer, "It Tango," is downright pretty in the way the minimalistic tune interacts with Anderson's voice, which is softer and more intimate (almost sexy, in a downtown-cool sort of way) than on the rest of the album. Not everything works -- "Walking and Falling" is negligible, and the way Rufus Harley's bagpipes intentionally clash with Anderson's harsh, nasal singing and mannered phrasing in "Sweaters" will annoy those listeners who can't take either Yoko Ono or Meredith Monk -- but Big Science is a landmark release in the New York art scene of the '80s, and quite possibly the best art rock album of the decade.

Laurie Anderson - Big Science  (flac 205mb)

01 From The Air 4:29
02 Big Science 6:14
03 Sweaters 2:18
04 Walking & Falling 2:10
05 Born, Never Asked 4:56
06 O Superman (For Massenet) 8:21
07 Example #22 2:59
08 Let X=X 3:51
09 It Tango 3:01

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Probably the most pop-accessible of Laurie Anderson's recorded work, Mister Heartbreak features a number of stunning luminaries on the cutting edge of popular music at the time. Striking guitar work by King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew permeates this disc -- notably on "Sharkey's Day" -- punchy and angular. The production and bass work from Bill Laswell is superb. Peter Gabriel -- at the time still coming off the buzz of his departure from Genesis -- is featured in a duet with Anderson on "Excellent Birds." There is a heavy reliance on early-'80s synthesizers which would normally be very off-putting, but here they are executed well. Nowhere does the music slip into irreparable '80s cliché; it is still an entertaining listen. Lyrics are typical of Anderson' work -- complex, literate, provocative, difficult to fully comprehend. Haunting "Gravity's Angel" borrows imagery from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Spoken word delivery on "Sharkey's Night" is given by the legendary William S. Burroughs. This is a very satisfying listen and a great intro for those unfamiliar with Anderson's work.

Laurie Anderson - Mister Heartbreak  (flac 212mb)

01 Sharkey's Day 7:47
02 Langue D'Amour 6:18
03 Gravity's Angel 6:06
04 Kokoku 7:08
05 Excellent Birds 3:17
06 Blue Lagoon 7:08
07 Sharkey's Night (Voc.William S. Burroughs) 2:29

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Laurie Anderson's third proper studio album, coming over five years after 1984's Mister Heartbreak (1986's Home of the Brave was a film soundtrack), is a near-total departure from anything she had done before or, indeed, anything she did after. The most purely musical of Anderson's albums and the one on which she does the most actual singing (though her trademark deadpan spoken-word passages are still present and accounted for), Strange Angels seems to be Anderson's idea of a straightforward pop album. Of course, given Anderson's pedigree, this is not Whitney Houston territory; the closest parallel would be Joni Mitchell's more experimental, post-Mingus work: pretty but chilly, with a certain emotional distance even on the most immediately appealing. There appears to be no underlying concept to the album, although the lyrical themes of three of the songs are explicitly taken from 19th century American literature. The musical arrangements are remarkably complex and feature cameos from not only Anderson's usual collaborators (Adrian Belew, David Van Tieghem, etc.) but also a motley crew ranging from jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin to session keyboardist Robbie Kilgore. As a result, the songs are sometimes a little too busy, but Anderson manages to remain the center of attention throughout. An album on which longtime Anderson fans tend to be divided, Strange Angels is a perfect introduction for anyone who might find the deadpan surrealism of Big Science or United States I-IV a bit much.

Laurie Anderson - Strange Angels (flac 261mb)

01 Strange Angels 3:51
02 Monkey's Paw 4:31
03 Coolsville 4:32
04 Ramon 5:03
05 Babydoll 3:38
06 Beautiful Red Dress 4:43
07 The Day The Devil 3:59
08 The Dream Before 3:02
09 My Eyes 5:27
10 Hiawatha 6:49

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