Laurie Anderson : All The Animals...

Last Sunday afternoon Paul and I hot-footed it from the Emirates Stadium down to the Brighton Festival to see the grande dame of avant garde the iconic Laurie Anderson perform her show All The Animals at the glitzy Brighton Dome Concert Hall.

All The Animals was a fabulous menagerie of Anderson’s work over the years from the poignant – her dying mother’s vision of animals on the ceiling above her hospital bed – to the apocalyptic – species extinction and environmental collapse – to the downright sensible – never try to make an opera out of Moby Dick, or any other novel that you really care about. It just won’t work.

From The Air:-
Good evening.
This is your Captain.
We are about to attempt a crash landing.
Please extinguish all cigarettes.
Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position.
Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees. Your Captain says: Put your head on your hands. Captain says: Put your hands on your head.
Put your hands on your hips.
Heh heh.

For with age (Anderson is an elfin 67) comes wisdom. And self-knowledge. And humour. A lot of it. Anderson’s wry delivery and gentle storytelling camouflaged her technical brilliance. She was very busy up on stage, creating sounds and colours, new audio atmospheres. She was busy but she was playing. She was having fun, and it was wonderful.

Her rat terrier, Lolabelle, even played the blues as an encore - catch it while you can on YouTube.

All The Animals was a triumph for wonder.

Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet...

Last Friday Paul and I went to the Barbican Hall to see Landfall - Laurie Anderson's latest work - this time a collaborative work with the Kronos Quartet.

These two new musical colossuses joined for a 75 minute mildly whimsical and often diverting rag bag of pieces which were at times captivating but at times frustratingly brief.

Anderson's stories of Hurricane Sandy, her flooded archive and the frustration of other people telling you about their dreams were engaging enough but like the musical works all too brief.

It's almost as if Anderson was too deferential to the Quartet with their sublime fiddling and so lost her own captivating performance style.

One aspect that really worked though was when letters, symbols and words fluttered across a screen at the back, magically coordinated by some computer software to the sounds being played

Next time though let's have our Laurie back doing what she does best. Solo work.

Meltdown 2012: Laurie Anderson Dirtday!...

A few weeks ago Paul and I went to see Laurie Anderson perform Dirtday! as part of the Antony Hegarty curated Meltdown festival at The Royal Festival Hall on London's glitzy South Bank. The third and last in her series of solo story works, which includes Happiness and The End of the Moon, Dirtday! is the culmination of Anderson's ground breaking work in this genre. Dirtday! sees Anderson present her views on politics, theories of evolution, families, history, and even animals. Set against a detailed and lush sonic landscape, the powerful and soulful collection of songs and stories create a unique picture, a hallucinatory world made of dreams and reality. We simply loved it.