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.