Laurie Anderson | Artist
Laura "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director born 1947 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Anderson is an electronic music pioneer whose work spans performance art, pop music, multimedia projects and stage & screen soundtracks. As a young girl she studied art and violin, and became a member of the Chicago Youth Symphony. Anderson was educated in New York, where she took degrees in art history and sculpture. After her graduation, she spent some time teaching art history and Egyptian architecture. Her first performance-art piece, a symphony played on automobile horns, was performed in 1969. Throughout the 1970's Anderson created a series of avant-garde performance art projects plus she began composing and recording music works, many of which have remained unreleased. As a musician Anderson has collaborated with contemporary music artists such as, Kronos Quartet, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno and her husband, Lou Reed. She also collaborated with Beat-era writer William S. Burroughs on her 1981 work You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. Anderson's 1982 song "O Superman" came out of the blue and gave her mainstream audience exposure when it reached #2 in the UK Singles charts. This haunting piece, which was initially released as a promotion only, is built on Anderson's vocals overlaid on a sparse background of two alternating chords formed by the repeated spoken syllable "ha" created by looping with an Eventide Harmonizer, with a Roland VP-330 vocoder used to make her voice sound like a Greek chorus. The song was included on Anderson's album Big Science. To-date Laurie Anderson has released 13 studio albums, including collaborations and film soundtracks. Outstanding albums include Big Science (1982), Mr Heartbreak (1984), Bright Red (1994), United States Live (1984), Homeland (2010) and Heart of a Dog Soundtrack (2015). Anderson and the Kronos Quartet's Landfall won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. Among her many acomplishments, Anderson has invented several experimental musical instruments used in her recordings and performances. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. She also developed a 6 foot long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds, which she called a "talking stick." Anderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992 in New York, and she was married to him from April 2008 until his death in 2013. In her private life she is a long-time student of Buddhism and meditation.
Artist Website: laurieanderson.com
Featured Albums: Laurie Anderson
Related Artists: Lou Reed, Kronos Quartet, John Zorn
Collections: Women of Note, Music Visionaries
