LAURIE ANDERSON UNCHAINED

The Time is now, with a little bit of yesterday and a lot of tomorrow thrown in for good measure. The place is America— the beautiful and the not-so-beautiful, constantly changing yet always the same. And the record is Laurie Anderson's Big Science, a stunning debut from a woman who promises to be one of the creative forces of the decade. Using music, poetry, film, slides, mime, anecdotes, photography, animation and a grab-bag of hightech toys like vocoders, harmonizers, and digital delays, Laurie Anderson is exploring what it means to be human in the techno/computer age, and the result is a multi-media vision as complex and awe-inspiring as America itself.

Although Big Science is the first full album to be released under her name, Laurie Anderson has actually been active in the art world since the early '70s. Operating in the somewhat hazy field of performance art (which makes a virtue of its "you had to be there" nature), she would do things like strap on skates which had been frozen into blocks of ice and slide around until the ice melted, all the while playing the violin and prodding her viewers with humorous insights into human nature and pointed social criticisms (her real stock in trade, whatever the trappings). Some of her musical/verbal sketches began appearing on various poetry and "New Music" LFs during the latter part of the decade, but it wasn't until the freak success in England of her independently-produced single "O Superman" that she came to the attention of the music world. But while the eerie 8V2 minute "song" was deemed by club-goers to be the song-most-likely-toclear-a-dancefloor, it surprised everyone by lodging itself near the top of the English charts, enticing Warner Brothers to release the single and subsequent LP over here.

Which is only fitting, in that America is and has been Anderson's main inspiration —directly or obliquely—since the beginning. Her current body of work is in fact called simply "United States I-IV," and consists of a four-part examination of our socio-political fabric, our unravelling personal ties, our corporate economy, and the freedom and. alienation inherent in our mobile society. The eight vignettes on Big Science are at best a fleeting glimpse of this mammoth project (and somewhat lacking for not being able to show her visual side), and even the two-hour excerpts she recently toured with—staggering as they were—only served to whet interest in the complete eight-hour cycle, which will be premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this fall.

"You probably need a nice pithy statement that looks good in quotes..."

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"It's a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight. "

For all its vast scope and serious intent, Laurie Anderson's work gains much of its power from her use of humor and attention to seemingly trivial details which pile up and resonate off each other. For example, there's the monologue on how ; women often seem to be using their infants in their strollers as traffic detectors when stepping off a curb. As her smooth filtered voice tells the story, this insignificant action takes on the overtones of menace (with helpless babies being exploited by their all-powerful mothers) and yet still leaves one aching from laughter. And once Laurie Anderson has gotten you to see a situation through her eyes, it's hard to ever look at it the same way again.

"Most of the images or situations I use are extremely simple," Anderson confides on the morning after two triumphant shows at the Park West Theater in Chicago. As we both grapple with early morning fogginess I can't help but notice that she looks younger in person than she does on records released a year ago or even as early as 1977 ("...and I said: OK. Who is this really?"). Her voice—untreated for a change—is soft yet engaging, and her sentences are characterized by pauses and leaps in thought.

"I mean they're things.. .that you just run across. I think the reason people laugh at the thing about the baby carriages is that you've seen that a million times. And you can picture yourself in that situation, too, being rolled around helpless. Or anyone that gets on a plane, and gets strapped into their seats—it's like a flying hospital where the nurse comes up and down the aisle— Would you like some more coffee or tea, or another shot...?— in this bullet through the skies. It's really odd..."

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"Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a'right where they're going to build the new shopping mall, go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway, take a left at what's going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they're thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place... "

If there's a dominant theme running through Laurie Anderson's work, it's notion of transformation. Relationships change, society changes, technology multiplies, people move from place to place like skipping stones (or wake up to find that the landscape has changed almost overnight). Change—for better or worse, and with all the uncertainty and fear that may accompany it—is in Anderson's opinion about as American an idea as you can find.

"With Europeans," she elaborates, "that's the most foreign thing to them about this country—is that people think that they could be bom one way and then turn into something else. They're so much more rooted in who they are, what kind of class they're from, what kind of job they do...They know where they'll be when they're 70—Americans don't. We have so many options, and this idea of change I think is something that Americans call 'freedom.' I mean the fact that you can change is probably different from being free—in what we're not free to not change—but it's totally associated."

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Anderson's music embodies a wealth of transformations, as she employs electronic treatments to make things quite different from what they seem to be. One second her voice will be soothing and motherly— the next second her gadgets can have her sounding like a man's voice oyer a P. A., or a choir, or a distant telephone caller. ("I guess I don't like the sound of own voice that much—I like to use those filters because when you have a different voice like that you find you have different things to say.")

These same gadgets can make her violin sound like a banjo, or a heavy metal guitar, and on one occasion she played a special violin that spoke words as she drew her bow across it. Perceptions break down under the strain of her electronic alchemy, and the seamless flow of images—verbal, visual, and musical, banal and miraculous —induces a heady—almost surreal— dream-like atmosphere unlike any other concert I've ever seen.

Having shown her grasp of an astounding array of media, Anderson's position now is enviably open-ended, allowing her to shift the balance between words and music, visuals and motion as she sees fit (her volatile shifts in form and style threaten to make even a chameleon like Bowie seem conservative). And one need only listen to the primitive roots of "On The Air" that appears on the Nova Convention LP to hear how much time can alter and improve her vision.

"Working on the next thing I do will probably be very different," she muses. "I mean I'm glad I did a very talky record, but I think the things I like best from Big Science, were the things where the talking was closer to the music."

On the other hand, she doesn't seem particularly drawn to the image of a "singing star."

"Well," she admits after a bit of thought, "I am kind of singing, but I want to stay in a sort of no man's land between singing and talking. I'm not the type to belt out a song—I just don't feel the impulse.

"It looks like my second album will be a videodisc," she offers, adding yet another technological extension-of-self of her repertoire. "I've always tried to make a kind of even balance between pictures and sound. You just have to find a way to learn NOT to be hypnotized by video, and to use the things it can do well, and that's a big thing to be trying to learn right now...I mean, most rock 'n' roll promos are just horrible. There's boys dancing on the roof, boys singing in the shower, boys on the street...

"I think somebody's gonna come along and really change video a lot, because... eventually somebody's gonna know what to do. The thing about a lot of the electronics I use is that I'm not sure how well they transfer onto video, because they're already tricks, and you could assume maybe that it was done in the studio as some kind of editing trick...So it means a lot of careful thinking about what editing means, and what it means to put something in that box."

So is she at all put off by television's refusal to live up to its possibilities?

"That is the problem...It means, first of all, a big mistake to call TV communication —it's really P.R., it's sales...it's money. It doesn't have much to do with communication that I can see."

At this point it comes time to wrap things up, as Anderson has to rehearse for another performance that evening.

"Let's see," she says, "you probably need a nice pithy statement that looks good in quotes to wrap things up with..."

Sure, whatcha got?

"Hmmmm.. .how about...

"Freedom is the ability to change the channel, but after a certain point it just becomes overwhelming—it's just too much."

Yodellayheehoo.