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 Is all music reducible to such a dichotomy – THE VIOLIN HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A PIPE ORGAN – and must we do that?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”.