Laurie Anderson – Life on a string
I believe this album is related to Moby Dick in some way. I’ve tried to read it twice now, once borrowing Heppell’s beautiful edition of it with the weird engravings in blue on the front., the other time with a shitty copy I picked up for 20p in the Amnesty bookshop on Gloucester Road.

The first time I got to the chapter about different kinds of whales. She begins now singing about one white whale. The fact that it’s white (as I think I remember) is something to do with white as purity, a theory of colours that enlists white as a truth-teller. Joyce talks a lot about colours in the third section of Finnegan’s wake, a congregational prism coming to listen to white. In a way, I’m afraid of reaching the end of the book if I ever pick it up again (and I will), reading that they kill the white whale. I have heard somewhere that Moby Dick has lots of postmodern (in the sense of decentralised truth) premonitions or shadows.

Anyway, Laurie Anderson. This is my last album of hers, I’m going to hit a stream of vinyl soon, will have to try and get rid of it before I go to Japan. This must be the song of Quequeeg…a song about coconuts and beans in a hollow gourd. I copied this to put on a tape to take me and Dan from Edinburgh to Bolton. She’s pictured on the cover with a violin but there’s been no sound of a violin so far… but the old Laurie Anderson spoken-word comes in soon enough. It must be so difficult to carve out a style and not have it become a straightjacket.

My shadow typing on the wall looks like I could be playing the piano. Laurie Anderson slips back into the old sprechgesang, and I’m entirely grateful after her singing on the last last album…
Here are the wonderful treacle and tar strings of Van Dyke Parks now…everything should be so polite and fringed with pearls when his players start to play, but there’s no semblance of a repeated tune, regular time signature or anything, it’s like being elegantly drunk where the pavement sways and buckles with caramel and smoke.

There’s quite a number of breakbeats used in this album so far…she almost gets away with it…probably does entirely. I wish I knew the story of Moby Dick properly, or even if this album is following it…

She seems to catch in this album a halfway between her Anderson-style unsettling comments and a kind of misty dinner party glow. That head-nodding sleepy and shiny vibe. Life on a string that is very seductive and hints at some different way of knowing but really delivers nothing and fades away with canapés and candles.

Laurie Anderson – United State 1984 (live)
Ah, this is much better. I actually listened to this about a week ago, walking to iffi’s house for Sunday lunch (where we jammed for ooh, half an hour on the piano and I discovered “knots” by R.D Laing, which I went all a-searching for in bookshops on my way to work that night, to find it was out of print and would cost me £95 to acquire, before finding it a week or so later for £2.99 in an Oxfam bookshop). Anyway, I got up Nine Trees Hill on my way to Cotham. Laurie Anderson playing her violin like a guitar and singing about dogs and Dolly Parton. I must have got these albums mixed up (big rap on the knuckles from the Angel Gabriel of no-skips-no-shuffles).

Today I’m tidying up again. Law exam soon. She plays her violin like a pipe organ. So much more interest and control over “sound” rather than “song” (a back-and-forth that I’m sure began with my listening to Tim Buckley and then Jeff Buckley and thinking about all the spaces between notes and lyrics… is the music the forefront or the voice? Is all music reducible to such a dichotomy – THE VIOLIN HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A PIPE ORGAN – and must we do that? I think maybe it’s something I do.).

Actually, jack and I were talking about the new Joanna Newsom album, with string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks. I’d heard a wee bit in a bookshop and told Jack I thought it sounded like her another album did after a few listenings…ok, maybe it’s a little unfair, but there is an element of meandering wishy-washy-ness after a while, but then as soon as I write that I think about songs of hers I love…anyway (I’m not writing much about Laurie Anderson am I? She’s very good and the relief to hear her talking in robot voices about circuits and luck and the law is overwhelming after all that rainforest shit)…we talked about JN and VDP, right? And how she “wins” in the first song, he “wins” in the second and the third is kind of a draw. In terms of aural dominance I suppose.

See, now she ties together the lost dog idea, the beginning of the opening of Big Science (from the air), and part of the show I saw her do in Edinburgh in 2004. Stories of aeroplanes, teenage girls, digital love affairs, stuffed rabbits. She tells the story of the girl and her computerese language, and displays that weird middle space she occupies between poet, musician, comedian. How quickly she changes the tone too, the audience laugh at her story of the guy who was constantly in “a bad mode”, but at her assertion that “current runs through bodies, and then it doesn’t”, and the damning assertion that “you don’t want to see this. Close your eyes. Have you lost your dog? Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot”… and now a whispered plea “Please don’t hang up, we have your number”.