NPR Music Tiny Desk Concerts

Laurie Anderson (2021x67)

Uitzenddatum: Mei 20, 2021

Laurie Anderson is a revolutionary artist who has mixed storytelling, music and technology for the past four decades plus. This Tiny Desk (home) concert celebrates the truly breathtaking breakthrough album she put out in 1982, Big Science. On that record, she used a few different voice processors; one of them was a Vocoder. By singing into a microphone attached to a keyboard, you can hear how it effectively adds harmony to her voice on "Let x=x." Laurie Anderson also used that effect, creating what I think of as 'the voice of authority' in her storytelling, on "O Superman," a song unlike anything music I'd heard when it came out in 1981. She made use of a vocal loop, something ever-present these days in sampling, but here she uses an Eventide Harmonizer, looping the single syllable "ha" as the rhythm of the song. It's a song about dealing with the technological revolution, about compassion; if it's your first time hearing it, take it in and see what strikes you.