Laurie Andersson

Nonesuch Records releases Laurie Anderson’s Amelia, the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient's first new album since 2018’s Grammy-winning Landfall. The record comprises 22 tracks about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight. Anderson, who Pitchfork says, ‘sees the future, but she starts by paying attention’, wrote the music and lyrics for this subjective narrative piece. On the album, she is joined by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota, and Kenny Wolleson.

There was a backlash against Laurie Anderson in "serious" musical and artistic circles after the completely unexpected mainstream commercial success of her debut album, Big Science. (The eight-plus-minute single "O Superman" was a chart hit in England, unbelievably enough.) A fair listen to Big Science leaves the impression that jealousy must have been at the root of the reception because Big Science is in no way a commercial sellout. A thoughtful and often hilariously funny collection of songs from Anderson's work in progress, United States I-IV, Big Science works both as a preview of the larger work and on its own merits. Opening with the hypnotic art rock of "From the Air," in which an airline pilot casually mentions that he's a caveman to a cyclical melody played in unison by a three-part reeds section, and the strangely beautiful title track…

1986's Home of the Brave is the soundtrack to a film consisting of live pieces debuted during Laurie Anderson's first world tour, promoting 1984's Mister Heartbreak. Only one song from that album, a radically reworked version of the William S. Burroughs cameo "Sharkey's Night," appears here; the rest of the album is something of a return to the performance art basis of Anderson's earlier work like Big Science and United States I-IV. As a result, Home of the Brave has an oddly reheated quality to it, as if Anderson is merely going through the motions of what had gone before while incorporating snatches of the new, more musical direction she had begun exploring with Mister Heartbreak. (Even the title is a self-conscious echo of United States I-IV.) There are some successes here - "Language Is a Virus" is probably the closest Anderson ever came to a real rock song, and it was a minor dancefloor and college radio hit…

Part string quartet, part radio play, part sound installation, Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet’s Landfall takes us on a journey through the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which battered the Caribbean and the mainland United States in October 2012. Anderson is a thoughtful sound artist, blending electronic and acoustic music with voice narration to tell her tale of loss and destruction. Poignant moments include “Thunder Continues in the Aftermath,” a haunting echo of the departing storm with stunning digital effects, and the vivid, spine-tingling “Helicopters Hang Over Downtown.” The simple, narrated “Everything Is Floating” transforms tragedy into unexpected beauty.

Sabine Erdmann may be a harpsichordist. But she’s also in love with her organ. So, she instantly caught fire when two friends suggested she should record a CD on it with music from the time of Heinrich Biber. There was no deeper concept, no precise plan. But with just two phone calls, Sabine had set up a trio of musicians from Berlin’s dynamic historically informed practise scene. Immediately, they began searching for rewarding and surprising repertoire.

Songs from the Bardo begins with a bell ringing out once, twice, three times, as a ritualistic chant emerges from the dense silence. The collaborative composition by avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson, Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal, and composer and activist Jesse Paris Smith is a guided journey through the visionary text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, unfolding in an 80-minute ebb and flow of sound and words. Songs from the Bardo is a transporting experience, meant to draw the listener into the present moment and provide a framework for inner exploration. Anderson, Choegyal, and Smith fuse modern compositional techniques with the mystique of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to make these visionary traditions more accessible to a new generation of listeners and to reveal the ancient wisdoms contained within.

Probably the most pop-accessible of Laurie Anderson's recorded work, Mister Heartbreak features a number of stunning luminaries on the cutting edge of popular music at the time. Striking guitar work by King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew permeates this disc – notably on "Sharkey's Day" – punchy and angular. The production and bass work from Bill Laswell is superb. Peter Gabriel – at the time still coming off the buzz of his departure from Genesis – is featured in a duet with Anderson on "Excellent Birds." There is a heavy reliance on early-'80s synthesizers which would normally be very off-putting, but here they are executed well. Nowhere does the music slip into irreparable '80s cliché; it is still an entertaining listen. Lyrics are typical of Anderson' work – complex, literate, provocative, difficult to fully comprehend. Haunting "Gravity's Angel" borrows imagery from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Spoken word delivery on "Sharkey's Night" is given by the legendary William S. Burroughs. This is a very satisfying listen and a great intro for those unfamiliar with Anderson's work.