# Laurie Anderson (1947- )



## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

*Laurie Anderson*

Laura Phillips Anderson (born June 5, 1947), known as Laurie Anderson, is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a "talking stick," a six-foot (1.8 m) long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.

She is the latest invitee in the Harvard Norton Lecture series, and the six videos are available on YouTube. Here's No. 1:






Please add your comments about her career and favorite works here.

Her primary discography includes these studio recordings:

_Big Science_ (1982)
_Mister Heartbreak_ (1984)
_Home of the Brave_ (1986)
_Strange Angels_ (1989)
_Bright Red_ (1994)
_Life on a String_ (2001)
_Homeland_ (2010)

- and these live albums:

_United States Live_ (boxed set) (1984) 
_Live in New York _(2002)

One of her recent collaborations is with the *Kronos Quartet*, _Landfall_, about her experience during Hurricane Sandy, released in 2012. It is an effective, evocative, and moving portrait of the experience and aftermath of that devastating storm.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

When I saw this, my first thought was, "Oh, no, she didn't die, did she?"

Thirty years ago, she made a statement which was so relevant that it still speaks to our time. She was explaining why she used voice filters to modulate the sound of her voice, and she said it was to symbolize our time. There is so much information coming to us all at the same time that most of us have our information processed to us through filters (CNN, Fox News, Twitter, etc.). Because of that, instead of the Information Age, we're really in the new Dark Ages.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Manxfeeder said:


> When I saw this, my first thought was, "Oh, no, she didn't die, did she?"
> 
> Thirty years ago, she made a statement which was so relevant that it still speaks to our time. She was explaining why she used voice filters to modulate the sound of her voice, and she said it was to symbolize our time. There is so much information coming to us all at the same time that most of us have our information processed to us through filters (CNN, Fox News, Twitter, etc.). Because of that, instead of the Information Age, we're really in the new Dark Ages.


For much of my adult life, along with working as a musician and songwriter I've been a librarian. I noticed that as digital and cyber media became the standard storage formats I began to notice little things like the notes and bibliographies were often not in the back of the book but found on a website with a URL cited instead. Over time some of those URLs became dead when the hosting platform either crashed or the publisher no longer paid to keep it live, leaving the main text without the sources for future researchers to check the accuracy of the author's reporting.

My first thought was that these electronic sources were not as permanent as the printed books and even manuscripts we've archived, in some cases 500 years or more. Print sources cannot be changed which is not true of Internet news resources. News reports can disappear, or free speech can be suppressed (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter).

I thought to myself, the high tech age could usher in new dark age.


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