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Laurie AndersonArticle from Music Technology, July 1987 |
Six years have passed since New York's best-known performance artist leapt to fame with 'O, Superman'. Tim Goodyer finds she's still stretching technology to its limits in her new film 'Home of the Brave'.
Six years after the unlikely success of '0, Superman' and the epic performances of 'United States', Laurie Anderson is still writing, singing, dancing, acting, and ripping new technology to shreds to make it sound good.
"I never documented my performances because they were about memory and I wanted them to be in people's memories. Then I realised people didn't remember them."
"I was taking a little cheap drum machine apart because it was broken, and I realised some of it was still working as I unravelled it. I saw this sensor was still going, so I thought I might as well sew it into a suit and remote the whole thing. I did all the obvious things like put the kick on the heart, the snare drum on the knee and percussion parts on the wrists. It's another portable instrument. Like a lot of this stuff, it comes of having the equipment and having it break. It's not the original machine any more, because I had to re-break some more drum machines and combine a couple of them in another box."
Dance is an essential ingredient of Anderson's live work, and Home of the Brave includes several dance sequences. But their choreography turns out to be a little different from that of most dance routines.
"It all started off with signals to technicians", Anderson recalls. "Most of the live keyboard parts are one-handed things for that reason. A lot of the performances have been based on hand signals that I don't think are obvious to the audience - although maybe they are, I don't know. They're signals to the follow spot operator, to the lighting designer, to the monitor mixer, to the house mixer, to someone doing the electronics... Each of them is part of a code about what to do next because, although the concerts are live post-production, they are still very flexible because things always break and you need a plan for what to do next.
"A rotating hand movement might mean 'go to the next film because I'm going to have to improvise something here'. Eventually tours straighten out and you don't need to make too many signals, but by that time it's too late, they're already built in. They turn from a kind of semaphore into a kind of dancing. Because there is no right-hand keyboard part there, you have to fill in. For example, the right hand action on 'Smoke Rings' was originally for a different reason. That was to do away with the drum part and to count out time to the other musicians, particularly the singers, because I work in so many odd metres.
They have to feel the odd time signatures in some physical way like I do, so it turned into a kind of aerobics dance, and if they can follow that, they can understand what's happening."
THE SOUNDTRACK TO Home of the Brave has its emphasis firmly on performance. The sounds themselves seem to strike a careful balance between the natural and the synthetic - but a closer examination of the synthetic sounds reveals them to be concentrated around treatments and samples.
"I'm not really interested in synthetic sounds, except in combination with sampled sounds", says Anderson. The instrument responsible for the samples and synthesised sounds is a Synclavier, which Anderson has owned for a while, with a little help from a Roland Vocoder Plus. For the moment, though, the £100,000 super system is in abeyance, having been ousted by an altogether more down-to-earth piece of technology.
"The Akai S900 is my favourite toy at the moment. I really like it very much - that and the Mac, they're a good pair. I did the whole Swimming to Cambodia score, the Jonathan Demme film, with one drum hit for the entire percussion sampled into the Akai, and it sounds like 50 different things. It's a lovely drum with a lovely sound to it, so I goofed around with it a bit and that's all there is. I don't think you'd ever suspect that it's just that one hit.
"I began to change my voice with harmonisers and delays. Originally I used the Eventide 910, then the 929. It came from being the only person on-stage."
"It came from being the only person onstage", she explains in a voice quite out of keeping with the subject. "I began to change my voice with harmonisers and various delays. Originally I used the Eventide 910, but the 929 had less of a delay so I ended up using that quite a lot. I found that using the Eventide at 0.72, which is my favourite setting, I could turn my voice into a shoe salesman's."
And so it's the shoe salesman who delivers many of Anderson's witty live monologues, like the curtain-raising 'Zero and One', where Anderson examines the differences between being someone and being a zero.
"After I'd finished making Home of the Brave, I found myself wondering what this guy looked like. So I did a video tape and from that I cloned myself. It was fascinating to see that guy come to life. I ended up with this character who's about three feet tall with a moustache and size 1 shoes. He's a preposterous guy, very insecure. He's not a tourable item, strictly video. I also realised that a lot of the facial expressions that I thought only I knew I was making in the performances using the voice filter were exaggerated in the clone. It's all blue screen stuff, that's part of his ineptitude, but I finally got him walking around and relating to the world, actually picking things up, so he's now integrated into his setting. It was a very satisfying feeling having done that."
The success is rewarded with a fresh smile. It was the nameless clone that came to Anderson's rescue after the trials of making Home of the Brave.
"To become an actor with this clone, which was me but wasn't me, was such a release. It's kinda silly... It's an extremely silly situation but it was a real antidote to working on Home of the Brave and looking at so many pictures of myself.
"He and I took a job co-hosting a television series that introduces avant-garde TV and film work. It starts with the premise that we're in a television studio and basically introducing him as a talkshow host. In the grand tradition of male and female co-hosts, we chat about what's about to come up and make up little songs together. He wrote some good songs, too. But we eventually work it out like most couples.
"The situation is if I'm really too busy doing interviews and photo sessions to do any more work, then he gradually takes over."
The real-life Home of the Brave is modern-day America, where the national budget for military marching bands is larger than that for the arts, including opera, theatre, painting, sculpture and contemporary music.
"It's incredible. That's a lot of band uniforms and sheet music. You can feel the Reagan era happening, people don't have the money to produce things any more. You only have to look at a few of the statistics and you can understand why. Reagan only has a short period of time left now people are finding out what he's done. Another frightening statistic is that everyone west of the Mississippi river is paying the interest on the national debt with their taxes; all their taxes go to that. When Reagan came to power there was no national debt. When you write out your tax cheque you always hope that one or two of your dollars is going to find its way into a hospital or a road. It's something that a lot of artists are trying to pay a lot more attention to now. I feel it in my own work and its relationship to politics. It seems so hopeless the way it is now." For the first time the smile is gone: Anderson's concern is deep and genuine.
"I'm doing an AIDS benefit in New York in a couple of days with Gidon Kramer. The idea was to pair odd couples together so they came up with Gidon Kramer and Laurie Anderson. He's been called the best violinist in the world so it's quite terrifying. Whilst I do consider myself a violinist of some sort, it's not in that virtuoso tradition.
"We've been racking our brains for something to play: he's tried to teach me some second violin parts to some things he can play and it was hopeless, absolutely humiliating. Then I tried to teach him some of my things and that wasn't really any better.
"So we've ended up with Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' with me putting a synthesised version of the orchestra, but sight-read so that I can change it at will. That's also terrifying because, not only will I be on the stage with the best violinist in the world, but I'll also be showing off my sight-reading keyboard chops which I'm not proud of."
Looking slightly further ahead, Anderson has just begun working on a new album. Her optimism and her smile return.
"I keep thinking I really want to strip things way down and make them very simple: that's partly why I've started working with the Akai. I had this illusion, and it is an illusion, that I liked the simple things that I've done the best. I was like a lot of people who think their first record is their favourite, so I went and listened to it and it is really stripped-down.
"What I think is simple now is completely different to what it was six years ago. It was one of the first times I'd made myself sit down and listen to records that I'd made. It's not my idea of an interesting evening. I can hear mix moves - still. Years after the recording, I can hear my finger slipping on the fader and the level jerking up. You'd think you'd mellow on a record after a while and just enjoy it as music, but...
"...I have a pretty broad definition of music. I think you and I talking now is music. It's more like jazz than it is like a book, for example. Just because it's words, doesn't confine it to a printed page. It's improvisation, trying to make some sounds that actually represent something. But then I'm not sure jazz is about representing anything, are you?"
The smile is at its broadest, the interviewer is on the retreat. He manages a reply. "Yes, representing a combination of the player's personality, mood, ability..."
"So you think it's a kind of self-expression? I suppose to some extent I think that too, but in another way it can go far beyond that. It can go beyond what you happen to think you're feeling into something more. But then, I suppose that's self-expression too — projected self-expression."
Suddenly, her smile has become quite infectious.
Making Music with Big Science (Laurie Anderson) |
Bigger Science (Laurie Anderson) |
Laurie Anderson (Laurie Anderson) |
Technology's Champion (Peter Gabriel) |
Peter Gabriel - Behind The Mask (Peter Gabriel) |
Games Without Frontiers (Peter Gabriel) |
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Interview by Tim Goodyer
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