"Laurie Anderson: The Weather" at The Hirshhorn Musuem

On view at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. until July 31, 2022 is "Laurie Anderson: The Weather." Regular readers may recall I am a huge Laurie Anderson fan. I have adored this extraordinary multi-media artist, performer/storyteller, and musician for many years (previously here). I was lucky enough to see her groundbreaking, mind-boggling musical and theatrical performance art piece "United States I - IV" when she toured it in 1983, and have seen pretty much every tour and major piece since then.

The press release from The Hirshhorn reads:

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will present the largest-ever U.S. exhibition of artwork by groundbreaking multimedia artist, performer, musician and writer Laurie Anderson from Sept. 24–July 31, 2022. “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” will debut more than 10 new artworks, interspersed with select key works from throughout her career. Guiding visitors through an immersive audiovisual experience in the museum’s second-floor galleries, this dynamic exhibition will showcase the artist’s boundless creative process, featuring her work in video, performance, installation, painting and other media.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of live performances by Anderson from January 2022 to July 2022. “The Weather” is organized by the museum’s Robert and Arlene Kogod Secretarial Scholar, associate curator of media and performance art, Marina Isgro.

For more than four decades, Anderson has investigated issues such as American identity and the effects of technology on human relationships, often inventing new ways of interacting with technology. The Hirshhorn’s exhibition uses the museum’s prominent location on the National Mall to encourage viewers to reconsider the sociopolitical landscape. “The Weather” will include landmark artworks such as “Habeas Corpus” (2015), a video sculpture that examines via multimedia storytelling the experience of Mohammed el Gharani, who was detained at Guantánamo Bay throughout his adolescence.

“Anderson pushes the limits of contemporary art, from instrument-making to pioneering new and creative applications for emerging technologies,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “We are honored to present this monumental exhibition, which provides a platform for the artist’s newest innovations, situated within decades of artistic output that have defied categorization.”

Drawing on the Hirshhorn’s distinctive cylindrical architecture, the exhibition will be laid out as an ongoing narrative. Guiding visitors on an intimate and personal journey through her work, Anderson will interject at points throughout the exhibition space; portions of the gallery walls will be covered with writing and images that the artist has directly hand-painted.

“The Weather” will debut more than 10 new works by Anderson that highlight her unique blend of the personal, the poetic and the political. These include “Salute” (2021), a new installation featuring robotic flagpoles referencing Anderson’s song “O Superman” (1981), which broadened her following from the downtown New York art world to the MTV generation. Other new installations include the dystopic “The Knife Sharpeners” (2021) and the immersive “Four Talks” (2021), composed of sculptures and texts that investigate the relationship of language to objects. Another gallery will showcase a group of new, monumental paintings on the scale of her large performance works, some of which will appear in her new opera, Ark.

Demonstrating the range of Anderson’s multimedia practice, “The Weather” will feature video excerpts from the virtual-reality pieces “Chalkroom (2017) and “To the Moon” (2018). Earlier work will include excerpts from “Songs for Lines/Songs for Waves” (1977), the interactive “Handphone Table” (1978) and the narrative video installation “Sidewalk” (2012), a film projected onto the gallery floor with a story from the artist’s childhood.

Other featured photographic works include documented performances of “The Institutional Dream Series” (1972­–73) and “Object/Objection/Objectivity (Fully Automated Nikon)” (1973). Several violins and other musical instruments that Anderson designed and altered will be shown alongside photographs from her key performances from 1971 to present.

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/laurie-anderson-the-weather/
https://laurieanderson.com/

Laurie Anderson: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert on NPR

I adore Laurie Anderson (previously here). I have seen her many, many times in concert over the decades. I was even lucky enough to see her groundbreaking, mind-boggling musical and theatrical performance art piece "United States I - IV" when she toured it in 1983. She remains a national--international--treasure.

Bob Boilen | May 20, 2021
Laurie Anderson is a revolutionary artist who has mixed storytelling, music and technology for the past four decades plus. This Tiny Desk (home) concert celebrates the truly breathtaking breakthrough album she put out in 1982, Big Science. On that record, she used a few different voice processors; one of them was a Vocoder. By singing into a microphone attached to a keyboard, you can hear how it effectively adds harmony to her voice on "Let x=x." Laurie Anderson also used that effect, creating what I think of as 'the voice of authority' in her storytelling, on "O Superman," a song unlike anything music I'd heard when it came out in 1981. She made use of a vocal loop, something ever-present these days in sampling, but here she uses an Eventide Harmonizer, looping the single syllable "ha" as the rhythm of the song. It's a song about dealing with the technological revolution, about compassion; if it's your first time hearing it, take it in and see what strikes you.

Here, Roma Baran, who played on and produced Big Science with Laurie Anderson in 1982, performs on synthesizer. We also hear some brilliant cello and improv from Rubin Kodheli.

On a personal note, I was a lover of Laurie's music back in those days; they were also the days I played synthesizer in my band Tiny Desk Unit. We opened for Laurie Anderson in 1981, and Laurie joined us onstage for a song. I bring this up because the Tiny Desk name (created by our guitarist Michael Barron) was familiar to Laurie long before this NPR series existed. At the end of her home concert, Laurie, I assume, mistakingly, thanks Tiny Desk Unit for having her. It made me smile and sparked so many memories. Thank you, Laurie.

https://laurieanderson.com/

"Breathing Out" by Keaton Henson

Exquisite, achingly beautiful and agonizingly intense music. This is "Breathing Out," the last movement of Six Lethargies, a 70-minute orchestral piece by singer-songwriter-and-now-composer Keaton Henson (previously here, here, and here).

"Six Lethargies is a six part, long form work for string orchestra, written by musician, composer, writer and visual artist Keaton Henson. The album explores themes of trauma, empathy, mental illness, and the relationship between music and emotion. It was created intensively over three years, during intense episodes of the very themes it explores. He used his personal experience to plot out six distinct elements of trauma, anxiety and emotional difficulties.

Unable himself to read or write music, Henson first created maps of his personal experience, using complex linear drawings and paintings which he then translated into themes and melodies. A common theme throughout his work is always the element of emotion and vulnerable honesty; he shares the darkest and most complex parts of his personal experiences via his art, leading to work of breathtaking emotional resonance. By contrast, Henson himself is generally reclusive, revealing little else of himself, wherever possible avoiding interviews or public appearances.

As the Six Lethargies project began to take shape, Henson reached out to neuroscientists, psychologists and music theorists, to learn more about the acute relationship between music and emotion, and specifically its effect on us physiologically. ‘Thrill engineer’ and bio-data expert Brendan Walker worked closely with Henson to investigate this relationship and developed software to monitor electrodermal activity (EDA) in order to create a real time visual representation of the link between feelings, anxiety and music.

In fact, when Six Lethargies made its stunning sold out debut at London’s Barbican in July 2018, a portion of the audience were hooked up to ‘galvanic skin response monitors’, which read their anxiety levels in real time whilst listening to the performance, this in turn was fed to the lighting desk and it was this that controlled the colour and intensity of the venue’s lighting rig. As a result the audience were effectively watching how they were feeling while listening to the music, and as a result this amplified the emotional response of the audience to the music.

Known for his past struggles to perform live due to anxiety disorders, Henson himself watched from the sidelines as the audience reacted to an Orchestra performing the work with lighting controlled by their emotions.

This show marked the first new work by Henson for several years, he had released a number of indie/folk albums in previous years – resulting in plays on Radio 1 and huge critical praise, but due in part to the challenges posed by this growing renown and constant demands for him to perform live and appear publicly he had instead decided to retreat from the public eye, disappearing from the world of music and art. However, following the success of the Barbican event, performances at Sydney Opera House and the National Concert Hall Dublin followed. These shows were immersive, measurable experiences which showed how music can physiologically affect the body. They also illustrated how anxiety can be monitored and how it’s triggers could be potentially monitored or predicted, perhaps even eventually controlled, an important factor to consider when dealing with anxiety.

The success of these shows led to the recording of the Six Lethargies album, recorded earlier this year with the Liverpool Philharmonic at The Friary in Liverpool. Through its six movements the finished recording conveys both a personal, internal experience but it also seeks to create the possibility of a similar physiological response in the listener.

Six Lethargies is a profound and intense musical experience, but it is also, completely tonal, musical and ultimately an enjoyable listen on various levels. In spite of its subject matter and meticulous design, it is music that can be listened to as you would Henson’s compositional heroes such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Barber and Pärt. However, it can also be listened to as a cathartic and purgative experience, unbroken from beginning to end, taking the mind and body through a series of peaks and troughs and eventually leaving it in a stimulated but calm state."
from thankfolkforthat.com, https://thankfolkforthat.com/new-release-video-keaton-henson-breathing-out/

http://keatonhenson.com/

Just watched...

...Laurie Anderson's miraculous film "Heart Of A Dog" now in very limited release in theaters.

Regular readers know that I have adored extraordinary multi-media artist and musician Laurie Anderson for many years (previously here and here). I was lucky enough to see her groundbreaking, mind-boggling musical and theatrical performance art piece "United States I - IV" when she toured it in 1983 and have seen pretty much every tour and major piece since then. You see, I am also lucky enough to live in Northern California, home to Cal Performances and Stanford, both of whom have commissioned some of Anderson's major works which are, naturally, debuted either at the Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley or at Stanford. I see her every time she is here.

Over the decades, I have seen her performance output and expression pass from film-and-multi-media extravaganza, to alternative/New Wave/rock star, to more reflective story telling. Through it all, she has always been a supreme story teller, but it seems that as she has aged and as her artistic sensibilities have aged, she has settled into the role of cultural historian. Of course her work and performances have always involved astute, pointed, and wry observations about the world in which we live. But as is the case with most artists who have longer careers, her powers have only sharpened, increased. Her performances are now so honed and nuanced that she can make me gasp or wring a tear from my eye with the slightest of vocal inflections. She is simply a master at play.

So I was very excited to see Anderson's newest project, a film entitled "Heart Of A Dog," her first film since her 1986 outing "Home of the Brave" which consisted of concert footage from her Mister Heartbreak Tour in support of her album of the same name.

Despite the shorter running time of 75 minutes, "Heart Of A Dog" feels full and rich. Her work has always had a haunting, captivating sense. She speaks frequently of dreams which is appropriate since her smooth, calm voice and careful, measured delivery can combine to create a sense of dreaming. Experiencing a Laurie Anderson performance is, in a way, to fall under a spell, a sort of waking dream in which her music and stories intermingle, rise and fall, give way to one another, and combine to create something ultimately poignant and sobering that you did not see coming. All of these qualities are at work in this film...and the fact that it is film only serves to enhance the sense of dreaming her performance since cinema is basically like dreaming at night: we sit in the dark, passive witnesses to whatever manifests before us.

"Heart Of A Dog" does consist of stories, passages, and musical pieces from some of Anderson's past performances--I recognized several--but this does not diminish the strength of the film in any way. Many of them are modified to fit the meaning of the work in its entirety. Essentially about love, loss, death, grief, and memory, she uses the loss of her beloved pet rat terrier dog Lolabelle and the more recent loss of her husband, legendary rock musician Lou Reed, as a springboard for a deep, incredibly rewarding and moving exploration of the topic.

The opening music for the film (a lonely song with pluck called "The Lake") sets the tone immediately. As we see a rotoscoped illustrated version of Anderson (all of the animation and illustration in the film is by Anderson herself), we hear her voice say, "This is my dream body. The one I use to walk around...in my dreams." In "From The Air," she muses, "What are days for? To wake us up. To put between the endless nights. What are nights for? To fall through time...into another world."

Indeed all of the music in the film--composed and performed on electronics and violin by Anderson--is perfect for not only the visuals but also for the important, spell-binding tapestry she builds. Meditative scenes of bare trees and rain are mixed with archival footage from her childhood and her art work. Peppered throughout are her usual erudite and fascinating references with her quoting such luminaries as Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.

While she may touch on psychology and philosophy and literature, the core of the film is primary and essential to us all: our relationships to those around us, to those we love. After the death of her sweet Lolabelle, Anderson realizes, "We had learned to love Lola as she loved us...with a tenderness we didn't know we had."

She also realizes how to connect with a kind of universal sense of love at the death of her mother even though the two were never close. She speaks several times of her Buddhist practice, mentioning her teacher and wondering about the Bardo, the realm in Tibetan Buddhism where the dead go after their physical death. Ultimately, she learns that the purpose for death is the release of love.

This touching, poignant film feels like a distillation of everything Anderson has been saying for her entire career. It is a perfect gem, concentrated and powerful. I know Anderson is only 68 and has years to go and will create more beautiful works, but somehow, it feels like a swan song. I mean, where does an artist go from something this wide and encompassing--from life and death itself?

Recommend? YES, although it might be difficult to find a theater that is playing it. Since HBO Documentary Films bought it right before she debuted it at the Venice Film Festival this year (2015), it is my hope that it will air on HBO sometime soon.
If not, the entire soundtrack, music and words, is available on Nonesuch Records and at iTunes.
http://www.nonesuch.com/albums/heart-of-a-dog

http://www.laurieanderson.com/

Laurie Anderson: "The Language of the Future"

Laurie Anderson is one of the 20th and 21st centuries most outstanding talents. Avant garde musician, performance artist, monologuist extraordinaire, raconteur, illustrator, filmmaker, painter, video and film artist, and composer, Anderson has been at the forefront of art performance, creating technologies (along with several instruments like the tape bow violin, the talking stick, and voice filters which she uses extensively in her work) and stunning special effects to help realize her fantastic vision on stage and off. I have seen Laurie Anderson many, many times over the years (I even saw her legendary "United States I - IV" in the early 80s) and whenever she is performing near me, I make an effort to see her (previously here and here).

We had tickets to see her when she was scheduled to perform at the new SF Jazz venue in San Francisco in April 2014, but her husband, the legendary musician Lou Reed had died only six months before. The show was postponed until this year and we got to see her last night at SF Jazz. In the intervening year, Anderson dreamed up a flexible evening of theater she is calling "The Language of the Future," a title from one of her older pieces. The evening is a collection of stories both old and new (I am resisting the temptation to call it a "Greatest Hits" concert but about half the stories she told were familiar to me), and improv music with a different musician every night. She told Robert Hurwitt at SFGate, “I’m going to be improv-ing with several of my favorite musicians. The first time I did improv was with [composer, multi-instrumentalist] John Zorn some six or seven years ago. He said, ‘Let’s do a night of improv,' and I said, ‘Well, uh, who starts? What key are we in?’ I was thinking, this sounds like a very bad idea. But once we started playing, it was thrilling. It was like building a ship and watching it sort of levitate into the air and do different things. It was really fascinating to me.”

She shared the stage last night with bassist Rob Wasserman who has also played with other luminaries, among them Rickie Lee Jones, Branford Marsalis, and Elvis Costello. The two of them wove improv duets (bass and violin) around her spoken word pieces, which, as she explained at the pre-concert talk, were all centered on animals. I was pleased to revisit some of her older pieces like "Langue d'Amour" from her 1984 album "Mister Heartbreak" (an ethnic folkstory about a woman and man who live on an island but the woman falls in love with a talking snake) and the show's title track, "The Language of the Future" which was part of her "United States I - IV" performance and subsequent four-disc set. She performed a touching, poignant piece which I seem to recall from her previous performance piece called "Delusion" about her dying mother talking to animal hallucinations on the ceiling, thanking them for everything. I also really enjoyed her song "The Whale" from "The Ugly One With the Jewels," which is a story about John Lilly:

John Lilly,
the guy who says he can talk to dolphins,
said he was in an aquarium
and he was talking to a big whale
who was swimming around and around in his tank.
And the whale kept asking him questions ... telepathically.
And one of the questions
the whale kept asking was: "Do all oceans have walls?"

This is so emblematic of Anderson's style in which a piece may start light or innocently enough but unfolds to a very concentrated--sometimes devastating--point. And one of the most chilling pieces of the evening was her rendition of "The Beginning of Memory" from her 2010 release, "Homeland." The following clip was filmed a few weeks ago when she performed "The Language of the Future" at an arts festival in Argentina.

It might have been a bit of a Greatest Hits evening, but I don't care. Anderson is always hypnotizing, thought provoking, funny, wise and inspiring. No matter how many times I hear her stories. Thank you Laurie, for making life on this planet more beautiful and precious.

http://www.laurieanderson.com/

"The Rest Of Us" by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld

I came across this spellbinding video the other day...I had seen Colin Stetson perform with Laurie Anderson a few years ago, but had not known of him as a solo artist. And I had not heard the work of violinist Sarah Neufeld. But what a wicked conflagration they make together!

Stetson plays the bass saxophone--well, play is not quite the right word. He wrangles it, he coerces it, he masticates it. Using the mindboggling technique of circular breathing, he is able to produce sounds, some melodious, but also use key clicks as layers of percussion. All the sounds heard in this video for the instrumental song "The Rest Of Us" were created by Stetson and Neufeld without using any delays or loops. The sound heard is the actual sound produced in the studio. And the piece is one of restrained savagery...it is all rhythm, repetition, and flying notes. The visuals are remarkable as well, possessing the visual clarity and oblique narrative of a Matthew Barney film. Let your imagination weave together the three different threads...

The song is from their most recent collaboration "Never Were The Way She Was."

http://colinstetson.com
http://sarahneufeldmusic.com

"Black Submarine" by Black Submarine

Wow. Brand new from a band composed of two ex-members of The Verve!
Intense.

http://blacksubmarine.co.uk/

"Working On A Dream" by Wintercoats

Exquisite, heavenly sounds from Wintercoats.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wintercoats/120050614689124
http://wintercoatsmusic.tumblr.com/

"Dirtday!"

I had the supreme pleasure of seeing Laurie Anderson's newest piece, "Dirtday!" in concert last night.

Laurie Anderson is one of the 20th and 21st centuries most outstanding talents. Avant garde musician, performance artist, monologuist extraordinaire, raconteur, illustrator, filmmaker, painter, video and film artist, and composer, Anderson has been at the forefront of art performance, creating technologies (along with several instruments like the tape bow violin, the talking stick, and voice filters which she uses extensively in her work) and stunning special effects to help realize her fantastic vision on stage and off.

"Dirtday!" is the third piece in a talking trilogy that started in 2002 with "Happiness" and continued with 2004's "The End Of The Moon." Some themes that arc across all three pieces include observations about the state of the country both literally and figuratively. Although Anderson's work has always included the "personal-IS-political" ethos, it seems to be manifesting itself more clearly and directly in her more recent works. And I believe that is because the country has never been this splintered and shaky in our living memories. In "Dirtday!" she returned again and again to an image of the country torn asunder:

"I dreamed the country was a a battleground...
At least I think it was a dream."

And then:

"I dreamed the United States was designated a battleground.
Memories and dreams being what they are, the country is looking a lot like a battleground."

I have seen Laurie Anderson many, many times over the years (I even saw her legendary "United States I - IV" in the early 80s), and "Dirtday!" feels at once familiar and new. At play is her very subtle sense of humor and her ability to temper dark subjects with a wryness that comes from her objective observational style, all underscored by a shifting, haunting soundscape that ebbs and flows. But it seems that the piece is light on stories (I recall past shows being crammed full of fascinating anecdotes), and more colored by a mournful music. Her violin pieces all seem to be crying and in despair. This seems to be in contrast to the celebratory reason for adding an exclamation point to the title of this show. These are dark times for us not only as a country, but as a planet. Anderson obviously feels this and she expressed it in simple ways, like a section she called "Words that start with 'the'..."

"THE dark
THE war
THE future
THE light
THE end"

The middle of the show was punctuated by a lovely spoken interlude, sans music, delivered from an easy chair, that was about the passing of her beloved dog Lolabelle, musings about Tibetan Buddhism, and the nature of love and loss. It was the most personal moment I have ever seen from Anderson. It puts the rest of her material in perspective, letting us know that she is genuine and earnest about all that she says.

http://www.laurieanderson.com/home.shtml