[.ca] United States Live (4 CD)

From Amazon.com:
For most musicians and groups, the live box set marks the culmination of a lengthy recording and concert career. Not so for Laurie Anderson, whose United States Live appeared in 1984, following her tenure in academic and bohemian circles and a small handful of releases on Warner Bros. and smaller labels. The release was an unusual event, though perhaps less so for a musician who seeks to upend musical traditions, most notably the distinctions between pop and classical, spoken and sung, live and Memorex. The lengthy set is a recording of a live performance composed of dozens of carefully defined experiments in form and technique, most of them fitting into one or two of these three categories: show pieces for items from her technological music arsenal (like her emblematic electric violin), witty narrative snippets (back when "spoken word" was called "performance art," prior to the rise of the poetry slam), and full-band performances, featuring, among others, Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem. "O Superman" and "Big Science" are the familiar titles that appear amid the nearly 80 tracks. "Just a slow accumulation of details," her computer-enhanced voice intones moments before the intro to "Blue Lagoon" (later heard in a studio version on Mister Heartbreak). That makes a nice epigram for the collection as a whole, which is essential to understanding art music of the '80s in general and the New York scene in particular. --Marc Weidenbaum

Overdue for digital remastering:
I remember seeing this performance series being advertised in The Village Voice & wanting desparately to go...but at 17, I didn't quite have the wherewithall to get the $ together to go & have always regretted this. But it was soon enough after that I had a summer job & the LPs were available. The sound was rather thin & scratches noticeable, so I bought the CD box soon after that. I always see this box set around (new & used), so I'm surprised that people say they haven't been able to find it. I always had half-wished that it had gone out of print, if only so that it finally gets the digital remastering (from the original tapes) that it deserves. The one thing that has bugged me about the set is that there is occassional popping/crackling noises that makes it sound as if the cd's were mastered from a pristine LP. The sound on the LP's was always very quiet & you had to turn up the volume, which made any surface noise extremely unpleasant. The CD's are louder, but the tape hiss is more obvious. Some cd's are already on their 3rd remastering.....so it seems that an upgrade is long overdue, SACD would be nice too.

Nights I Swim in the Blue Lagoon:
Yeah, it's worth \omoney\c for her 13:00 minute version of "Blue Lagoon" from MISTER HEARTBREAK. Professor Anderson says it all very well, below. I never fully appreciated Laurie until I saw her live recently on tour. I mean, I knew she was smart and inventive, but she finally got to me. She's paying attention to it all; she sees beneath the surfaces. I suspect you do, too. And she's coyly feminine and beguiling. This is a great live set.

Have worn out the cassettes; time to buy the CDs:
I don't need to go into the finer points of the performance, or of LA's career, in this review; that has been done already (see John Bickelhaupt's review in this section for a great take on the essence of US Live). I will say that if you want an intellectual, complex snapshot of the political, social, economic, psychological and popular culture forces driving Americans in the 1980s, you need to listen to this album. LA captures with (oftentimes frightening) clarity what living in America -- especially urban America -- entailed during that period. However, don't think that her lens is trained only on the '80s; to sum up her approach using a lyric line from a later album (in my opinion her most accessible album, Strange Angels): "History is an angel being blown backward into the future." So much stands out here, so much that is dissected and yet left opaque so that, rather than pontificating, LA simply draws pictures of the landscape and steps back, allowing for multiple interpretations. Key favorites in the work for me include "Violin Solo" (haunting); "Yankee See" (in which LA takes the ironic turn and parodies her own performance -- it also says much about American consumer culture and, specifically, the state of modern art); "Dance of Electricity"; "Private Property" (remember Wm. Buckley??); and, of course, "O Superman." How can you not shudder and snicker simultaneously at the lines: "And when love is gone/there's always justice/and when justice is gone/there's always force/and when force is gone/there's always Mom/hi Mom!" Be warned: This is difficult music. This album forces you to look over the precipice into the abyss. That's what's so great about it. One final, unrelated note: Whenever you can, see her live performance. She could read from the phone book and make it powerful. Best performance I saw was the "Empty Places" tour (supporting the Strange Angels album). Sadly did not see the US Live performance. At least with the recording, you can live it in your head. I guess it goes back to polysemic interpretation again. Instead of ruing the lack of visuals, the discs draw out your own personal memories, visions and nightmares. p.s. Think about the time this was recorded (early '80s) and the technology LA used for this performance work. There's a current exhibit at the Cleveland Inst. of Art on video/audio works from 1964-1977 that raises an interesting technical question: How does this media hold up over time? What LA did in US Live, the exhaustive work that went into the technical aspects -- any powerful computer and the right software could produce similar results with less effort today. (Of course, it wouldn't have LA's stamp on it, but mine is a technical point, not an interpretive one). Will we look back in 20 years and say, 'Wow, to think that she built that digital processor from the ground up!'? Will it seem as spectacular? And, more importantly, will we stop critiquing the very machines and technology we use to create the art; in other words, will we lose the self-reflexivity that LA captures so well in US Live (note "Yankee See" in particular as an example)? Hopefully, artists like LA will keep us honest. Sorry for the rambling. Just go out and buy this; or, if you're a neophyte, start with her newest live album or the "Talk Normal" retrospective.

Buy it, relive it or live it for the first time...:
I had the good fortune of attending this two day performance in Brooklyn. It felt then like we were participating in something special. Looking back it was as I can't think of anything else from the 80's that was in anyway cultural or arresting. Maybe the Clash's first night at bond's before the fire dept showed up? Anyway during intermission the second night my current wife then girlfriend accidently kicked Grace Jones in the ankle while she was sipping champagne. We thought she was going to kick both of our asses. Luckilly Phillip Glass was walking by at that moment and struck up a conversation w/ her and save us from such humiliation. Plus it was so hard to get a cab to take you from the city to brooklyn back then.

Absurdity filter:
In the 80's, I would listen to this over and over while I vacuumed the balcony's at a Florida beach condo where I was (barely) gainfully employed at the time. It operated for me on the level of the associations that it dredged up from my memories and knowledge. Are you well read in the history of modern military technolgies? Do you have a morbid fascination with environmental decay and the mostly unconsidered consequences of the choices imposed on us by imperatives of our economic system? Are you endowed with a cinematic imagination with which you can explore these consequences? If so, this recording is for you. The first time I ever heard Laurie Anderson's music, I was terrified. I got over it.

• Say Hello
• Walk the Dog
• Violin Solo
• Closed Circuits
• For a Large and Changing Room
• Pictures of It
• Language of the Future
• Cartoon Song
• Small Voice
• Three Walking Songs
• Healing Horn
• New Jersey Turnpike
• So Happy Birthday
• English
• Dance of Electricity
• Three Songs for Paper, Film and Video
• Sax Solo, Pt. 1 (Continued)
• Sax Duet, Pt. 1 (Continued)
• Born, Never Asked (Part One Continued)
• From the Air
• Beginning the French
• O Superman (For Massenet)
• Talkshow
• Frames for the Pictures
• Democratic Way
• Looking for You
• Walking and Falling
• Private Property
• Neon Duet
• Let X = X
• Mailman's Nightmare
• Difficult Listening Hour
• Language Is a Virus
• Reverb
• If You Can't Talk About It, Point to It
• Violin Walk
• City Song
• Finnish Farmers
• Big Science
• Red Map
• Hey Ah
• Bagpipe Solo
• Steven Weed
• Time and a Half
• Voices on Tape
• Example #22
• Strike
• False Documents
• New York Social Life
• Curious Phenomenon
• Yankee See
• I Dreamed I Had to Take a Test...
• Running Dogs
• Four, Three, Two, One
• Big Top
• It Was up in the Mountains
• Odd Objects
• Dr. Miller
• Big Science
• Big Science Reprise
• Cello Solo
• It Tango
• Blue Lagoon
• Hothead (La Langue d'Amour)
• Stiff Neck
• Telephone Song
• Sweaters
• We've Got Four Big Clocks (And They're All Ticking)
• Song for Two Jims
• Over the River
• Mach 20
• Rising Sun
• Visitors
• Stranger
• Classified
• Going Somewhere?
• Fireworks
• Dog Show
• Lighting Out for the Territories