EYEWITNESS
LAURIE ANDERSON ASKS, O SUPERMAN
She was making multimedia statements in the NY performance art milieu when lucky chance made her minimal eight-minute Gesamtkunstwerk of crashing planes, mothers and fate into a freak UK Number 2 hit in 1981. She followed up with prophetic album Big Science, diagnosing Reagan’s America and the troubled decades to come. “She’s capturing all sides, the personal, the universal and the political,” say friends and collaborators. “I’m talking to the part of you that never speaks,” she replies.
Interviews by MARTIN ASTON
Portrait by PAUL NATKIN
Laurie Anderson: I moved to New York and studied art history, but they didn’t let us make art, so I got a studio downtown and met people on the borders of art. [In 1974] I’d hitched to the North Pole – I almost got there – and when I got back, all my stuff had been stolen, my violin chopped up, drug addicts on every floor of my loft. But in the mail was an invite to ZBS [Zero Bullshit Studios], this sound commune. I started to make sort-of songs there, with violin, and I met [sound designer] Bob Bielecki. Bob also introduced me to meditation. Because of meditation, I started making loops, and then my stories would go over those loops.
I wanted sounds that were real too, like birds.
Bob George: [In the early ’70s] I’d attended the Whitney Museum studio programme, which taught kids how to navigate the art world. Another teacher was Laurie. She had a flip-hairstyle then, like Doris Day, not the spiky look she still has. I started helping her on projects, running projectors, coming up with stuff, – like, I built the violin bow [after Anderson’s idea of a bow made of recording tape with a magnetic tape head on the violin bridge].