It was more than a year ago, during Summer ‘07, that I first had the itch to switch up the Records at Random posts I’d been doing every Friday. I own a ton of vintage vinyl, but I have even more CDs (they’re smaller and take up less space) in my collection, and I download a whole lot of music. As such, a good deal of my digital collection is made up of old-school classic, rare records ripped to MP3 and reissues or represses of albums. And last Summer a whole pile of crazy reissues happened to fall in my lap, inspiring me to do something I hadn’t originally intended to, add anything from my music library, whether it exists corporeally as discs made of black wax and shiny prismatic plastic or virtually on my hard drive as a series of 1’s and 0’s.
One of the albums I was tempted to write up at the time was the groundbreaking 1982 LP Big Science by avant-garde performance artist, poet and experimental electronic musician Laurie Anderson, which was re-issued in a fancy new edition by the Nonesuch Records label in June of ‘07. Far removed from the sort of breakbeat-overflowing (though it has been sampled a number of times) dancefloor-igniting crate classics and vinyl oddities I usually editorialize, Big Science was inspiring because of how it prefigured the future. And I know, it’s not unusual for people to describe electronic music as “futuristic” simply because it’s made using synthetic sounds and robotic rhythms that elicit visions of the smooth architecture, animated neon-glowing cityscapes, computer-integrated lifestyles, cybernetic technology and gravity defying floating vehicles of sci-fi films. But Big Science, much like the work of electric visionary Bruce Haack, doesn’t just sound like it originates from some not-too-distant date in the future, it quite literally predicted it, and in an almost shockingly practical way.
Besides, people have been making “space-age” electronic music for over half-a-century using largely the same sonic palette, and though we officially live in the future I don’t reside in a high-rise that looks like a space-ship, have a robot butler or a flying car! So while I understand how tying electronic music into such future-myths may be romantic, and I’m guilty of doing it myself, it’s almost always far more fascinating for me to see how reflections of the present that existed in the past, and the expectations for the future that existed at that time, have manifested themselves in our now. Anderson is someone who’s never let the constraints of “now” hinder her creativity though. A spoken-word artist, singer, violinist and keyboardist, Anderson has not been afraid to make use of all manner of instrument, be they acoustic, electric, analog or digital. Not to mention technology that bends recorded sounds to her will. Much like the aforementioned Bruce Haack she even went so far as to create several instruments of her own including a wireless MIDI-controller called the “Talking Stick” and a violin which played back bits of recorded sound, first using audio tape in place of a bow played against a magnetic tape-head and later using MIDI-triggered audio samples. Over the years she’s collaborated with, among others, the likes of William S. Burroughs, Bill Laswell, Brian Eno and Art-Rock godfather Lou Reed, the last of which she carried on a longtime personal relationship with which culminated in marriage earlier this year.
What reminded me of my intent to blog about Big Science though? I recently put it on my iPod during one of my semi-regular refreshings of its contents and it happened to come on during a multi-municipality-spanning journey via city bus last week. It was the song “Example #22″ — an ebulliently macabre tune built around mad-scientist synthesizer chords, shiny horns and rickety, almost tribal percussion, that presages the sort of bright and carefree but uneasily dangerous avant-Pop that Björk has made her cause célèbre — which made me pause. It seemed such an unusually upbeat note for an album I’d recognized mostly for its often dark high-concept compositions which drawn from Anderson’s eight-hour, two-night multi-media performance art piece United States, a meditation on the social, political, technological and emotional anxieties of then-modern American society. An album most notable to my post-9/11 mind for it’s songs which seem to eerily (and it should be noted unintentionally) prognosticate the events of September 11th, 2001.
The album opens with one of them, the almost funky “From the Air,” a song written from the point of view of those aboard a plane about to crash. Over a spastic breakbeat, horns that blend the brassy slickness of Soul and Funk with the urgent cacophony of Free Jazz, looped vocoder phases and layers of agitated synths she relays the panicked scene and repeats key phrases like “this is the time, and this is the record of the time,” “I’ve got this funny feeling I’ve seen this all before,” “you are not alone,” and “stand by…” It’s very similar thematically to her 8-plus-minute opus “O Superman,” which was actually a substantial hit when it was released in 1981, and was one of the first landmarks of modern Electronica to break into the mainstream. Intended as a modern aria written in tribute to French Opera composer Jules Massenets the song’s lyrics deconstruct American industrialization and militarization in relation to the arms crises of the late ’70s and early ’80s juxtaposed against the changing forms of technological communication between Americans which was only just beginning to occur at the time. Its parochial religious overtones, subverted by pop-culture references, snatches of familial conversation, allusions to death from above and lines like “this is the hand, the hand that takes,” “you better get ready, ready to go,” and “here come the planes, they’re American planes, made in America, smoking or non smoking,” all delivered in a chilly vocoded robot-voice, lend it an altered sense of import in these last days of Bush’s America.
Laurie Anderson “O Superman”
Paranoid hindsight withstanding, “O Superman” is just as striking for its sonics as it is for its conceptuality, lyrical depth and poignancy. It’s minimal, consisting only of a repetitious sample of the word “ha” played as alternating notes over and over again, with the occasional swell of synth-strings, electronic honks, a flute sound, and towards the end a rumbling bass, bird-chirps and more dramatic synthesizer chords. Other songs — like “Born, Never Asked” a track that could easily be a modern-day Hip-Hop or R&B song with its buzzing synth-bass, African percussion and hand-claps, and “Let X=X” which flips a similar collection of sounds in a way that’s only slightly more reminiscent of British Synthpop — stand out too, for their audio textures and arrangements which were atypical at the time of their release but sound surprisingly contemporary to the modern ear.
The new Nonesuch pressing of Big Science is remastered, contains new liner-notes and features an “enhanced” portion which includes “Walking the Dog,” the original b-side of the “O Superman” single, as a bonus track. Whatever form you happen find it in you should cop it though. Iit’s an essential album, especially for fans of Electronica, IDM and socially/politically conscious Spoken Word.
