Laurie Anderson - Big Science
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CD Details
Artist: Laurie AndersonEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Enhanced, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2007-07-17
Music Label: Nonesuch
Product features:
- Laurie Anderson - Big Science
- From the Air
- Big Science
- Sweaters
- Walking & Falling
- Born, Never Asked
- O Superman (For Massenet)
- Example #22
- Let X=X
- It Tango
- Walk the Dog [Enhanced CD MP3]
Music reviews of Big Science
Music Review: Green Andy Reviews: Laurie Anderson - Big Science
Rating: 5 Stars
Laurie Anderson rarely thinks small. Her first large-scale performance piece was an eight-hour event entitled "United States I-IV", which was eventually condensed into the four-and-a-half-hour live album UNITED STATES LIVE, which was whittled down further into this album. At just under 40 minutes, Big Science takes the most musical aspects of that show, and presents them in as user-friendly a fashion as Laurie Anderson circa 1982 was ever likely to get. It was most people's first exposure to Anderson, who manages the tricky feat here of seeming sympathetic and completely alien at the same time.
Anderson has always primarily considered herself a storyteller, and the bulk of these songs betray their origins as spoken word pieces with slight musical accompaniment. The best songs use this to good effect: opener "From the Air" features Anderson talking the listener through a plane crash over a herky-jerk post-punk rhythm which contrasts with her deadpan voice to generate almost unbearable tension. The surprise UK hit "O Superman" is constructed almost entirely out of voices, with Laurie Anderson's vocoderized lead monologue laid atop a single looped syllable. Her intensely serene vocals are always the star of the show, and like other computerized expressionless voices, you eventually begin to infer emotion in them like an aural magic eye picture. The grating "Sweaters" briefly breaks her poker faced delivery, and is the worst track here as a result. On the other hand, the joyous "Example #22" finds Anderson managing to sound like she's actually having fun, and it's the closest thing to a party tune she'll probably ever make. But the real heart of the album is in the widescreen epic title track, and the ultra-minimalist closing duo of "Let X = X" and "It Tango", where the simple, intertwining rhythms and Anderson's soft-spoken repeated phrases build to a hypnotic crescendo.
There are a few missteps on the album, however. The aforementioned "Sweaters" sounded out-of-place on UNITED STATES LIVE, and it doesn't fare any better here. And while "Walking and Falling" contains the germ of an interesting idea, it's too undeveloped to even briefly hold your attention. But those two songs aside, this is a remarkably strong record, and it's been an incredible influence on leagues of art-rockers and minimalist composers in the decades since. Listen to it, and you'll be a Laurie Anderson fan forever.
Description of Big Science
Critics lauded the sonic experiments of this NY performance artist, and the UK gave her an unlikely hit when O Superman shot to #2. Here's the 1982 Warner Bros. LP that followed: O Superman; Big Science; From the Air , and the rest of these songs full of tape loops, found sounds and other ahead-of-their-time elements. Bonus audio and video, too!Big Science prompted trendy early-'80s art students to plug in their synthesizers and start their own postpunk performance-art-cum-rock-&-roll projects. The album actually produced a hit single in the form of "O Superman." That track and "Let X=X" are the two best-known things from this album, which is a condensation of United States, Anderson's four-and-a-half-hour performance-art piece. The entire show is available as United States Live, a four-disc box set. Big Science, however, presents the cream of the crop. Although a lot of Anderson's shrill non sequiturs seemed annoying at the time of her breakthrough, she predicted techno music years before it happened. Still, as rock critic J.D. Considine pointed out, her creations are often closer to theater than to music. --Bill Holdship
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