Interviews
The Speed of Sound and Vision: An interview with Laurie Anderson
by Felix Thursday
Over a thirty year career that has seen her performing violin
solos atop blocks of ice, conducting film scores and collaborating
with fellow innovators such as Beat novelist 
William S. Burroughs,
Minimalist composer Philip Glass, and pop music icons Brian Eno and
Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson has melded crafty humor with startling
insight to broaden the boundaries of popular music and performance
art.
Like most artists, she is at times prone to paradox. But her
creative wit is void of any pretensions. In fact, she's fairly
down-to-earth for someone who, like many of her close friends and
collaborators, seems destined for immortality--an idea she apparently
does not give much thought.
"I don't think about immortality at all," she quips, sounding
surprised and amused by the suggestion, "I'm too worried about what
I'm doing tomorrow. Actually, I'm too worried about what I'm doing
today. I'm kind of a worrier."
If there is something troubling Anderson, however, she does an
excellent job of concealing it. She appears relaxed and in bright
spirits during our introductions prior to her September 3rd engagement
at the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, where she presented her
latest masterpiece, The Speed of Darkness, a collection of songs and
stories about the past, present and future of art and technology.
While in the past she has incorporated elaborate stage props
into her performances--including choreographed dancers and giant
motion picture screens--Anderson has chosen a more intimate setting
for her latest foray into the musical and visual arts.
"The Speed of Darkness is my unplugged show--which involves
about fifty plugs. It's as close as I get to being acoustic."
Despite the often robotic tone of her music, Anderson exudes a
very human warmth and is both candid and casual in her discourse and
demeanor.
"The way I use electronics has always come from some very
identifiable source," she explains, "like a violin or a voice that
gets heavily processed. But you can still hear the nature of the
instrument or the voice through it. That's really important to me. I
don't just use it to decorate, I use it to change the music's sound."
At the same time, Anderson is hesitant to embrace everything the
electronic age and contemporary techno-culture have to offer.
"The other thing is that it is real ugly--digital stuff that you
look at on the net. The graphics are crummy, the sound is compressed
beyond recognition, and you get used to it the way people got used to
how bad TV looked. I think that's why this split happened between form
and content--because a lot of the beauty is missing. If you as any
artist what the difference is between form and content, they wouldn't
be able to tell you because they're so much the same thing. The way
you tell a story is how you tell it--whether you use blue or a guitar
or whatever. It becomes linked into the sensuality of it--and there's
not much sensuality in digital stuff.
Despite her obvious concerns, Anderson doesn't feel technology
is solely responsible for stripping humanity of its "human" essence.
"Stupidity strips us of things, too," she remarks. "I think
pencils could be blamed. Blaming your tools is never a really
effective thing. I think it's how we use them that might be the
problem. I don't think there's anything inherently creepy or
alienating or non-human about technology. It's just because some of
the stuff is new, so it has this voodoo thing around it. I guess
people used to think that about the telephone, too--until they started
having love affairs over it. They realized: "Hey, this is not that
alienating!" They just didn't know how to talk into it yet.
This interview appeared in section M magazine, Issue #2, October 1998.
