LAURIE ANDERSON UNCHAINED
Is That A Big Science In Your Pocket Or WHAT?
The Time is now, with a little bit of yesterday and a lot of tomorrow thrown in for good measure. The place is America— the beautiful and the not-so-beautiful, constantly changing yet always the same. And the record is Laurie Anderson's Big Science, a stunning debut from a woman who promises to be one of the creative forces of the decade. Using music, poetry, film, slides, mime, anecdotes, photography, animation and a grab-bag of hightech toys like vocoders, harmonizers, and digital delays, Laurie Anderson is exploring what it means to be human in the techno/computer age, and the result is a multi-media vision as complex and awe-inspiring as America itself.
Although Big Science is the first full album to be released under her name, Laurie Anderson has actually been active in the art world since the early '70s. Operating in the somewhat hazy field of performance art (which makes a virtue of its "you had to be there" nature), she would do things like strap on skates which had been frozen into blocks of ice and slide around until the ice melted, all the while playing the violin and prodding her viewers with humorous insights into human nature and pointed social criticisms (her real stock in trade, whatever the trappings). Some of her musical/verbal sketches began appearing on various poetry and "New Music" LFs during the latter part of the decade, but it wasn't until the freak success in England of her independently-produced single "O Superman" that she came to the attention of the music world. But while the eerie 8V2 minute "song" was deemed by club-goers to be the song-most-likely-toclear-a-dancefloor, it surprised everyone by lodging itself near the top of the English charts, enticing Warner Brothers to release the single and subsequent LP over here.
