2024-09-19 10:22:01
After more than forty years of performing, American musician Laurie Anderson has a loyal audience spanning both the pop culture scene and contemporary art. Texts, reviews and interviews are now abounding in the world’s media: in so many places her fans are happy that – at the age of seventy-seven – she recorded and released a new studio album.
The record, called simply Amelia, is monothematic, dedicated to aviator Amelia Earhart, who lived from 1897 to 1937 and became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932. When she attempted to circumnavigate the globe five years later, her plane was lost over the Pacific Ocean.
In many ways, that fate suits the lifelong themes of the New York author: the motif of technology, a story with a secret, and the figure of an exceptional woman. However, there is one more exciting story for the Czech cultural scene: groundbreaking artist, Grammy and film festival award winner Laurie Anderson is accompanied on the album from start to finish by the Brno Philharmonic. This is a truly exceptional achievement.
The chief conductor of the Brno orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, became the key link here. In the 1970s and 1980s, he significantly co-shaped the new American music, as one of the first to trust minimalists like Philip Glass: it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that he “knows everyone”.
The original version of Amelia for large orchestra was commissioned by Davies in 2000, when he also performed it under the title Songs for AE at New York’s Carnegie Hall. However, Laurie Anderson, who is more confident working in a home studio than arranging for an orchestra, was dissatisfied with the result, as she said in an interview with Aktuálně.cz. She put Amelia on hold for a long time and there was a threat that she would fall into her extensive activity – just as the engaging program Songs and Stories from Moby Dick never ended up on the album, for example.
Laurie is looking for Amelia
In 2019, however, Brno called with an invitation, so the composer and Davies returned to Amelia together. New parts emerged: duets by Laurie Anderson with electric violin or keyboards and Rubin Kodheli’s cello. Meanwhile, the conductor rewrote the orchestral part just for the string orchestra.
Laurie Anderson won her first Grammy in 2019. | Photo: Jim Cass
The premieres that took place in 2019 in the Besední dům were a new beginning. Laurie Anderson then performed Amelia with the Brno Philharmonic at the international Ars electronica festival in Linz, but also on the American tour of the orchestra in Kansas City. The year before last, the orchestral passages for the album were filmed again in Besední dům. The multimedia artist continued to work on it in New York and added a group of soloists.
The second important voice on the record is Anohni, guitarist Marc Ribot or the rhythm section of the Sex Mob group with whom Laurie Anderson performed in Prague last year. Petr Pšenica from the Brno orchestra plays the viola solo. This is how the studio version of Amelia was born. Spoken word, singing, instrumental diversions enter the constant sound stream of the string orchestra. The expression of musical instruments continuously, fatefully passes into the noise and hiss of radio waves, the modern technological connection that ultimately betrayed Amelia Earhart. “Her tragedy is the tragedy of modern communication,” says Laurie Anderson.
A woman made to fly
We hear the sound of the engine for the first time on the album. It’s a chance to remember that there were other planes early in this artist’s career: when she practically predicted plane terror attacks 19 years later in From The Air on 1982’s Big Science.
“The words used in Amelia are drawn from Amelia Earhart’s pilot journals, from the telegrams she wrote to her husband George, and from my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think,” says Laurie Anderson. She sees Amelia as a woman whose courage and trust in technology helped her fulfill her dream: she was convinced that she was made to fly, the author says about her. And as a Buddhist, she takes part in the pilot’s observation of the earth from a distance.
It doesn’t really matter if the suite, during which we fly around the world and feel the impending disaster, grips us more or a little less. In any case, the work of Laurie Anderson continues very vividly here, which managed to overcome a tricky point even after her big, breakthrough period in the 80s, when she brilliantly connected to globalization, the boom in cable television and home computers, and the unattractive politics of American President Ronald Reagan.
Again, her voice plays a role here, so often unemotional, intimately close. Laurie Anderson with her “narration in the ear” got ahead of the Internet trend of whispered ASMR videos – but she did not hide that a nice narration can contain slyness, media and political manipulation.
Dennis Russell Davies, as the author of the arrangement, does not impose too much avant-garde influence on the string orchestra, but at the same time he goes for well-known clichés, it is definitely not a soundtrack. The sound opalizes like light in a hot sound, overflows and rumbles, similar to the depth of the sea, sometimes in a rhythm and a more screeching consonance it captures a story that gradually leads to disaster.
Until recently, the end of Amelia Earhart was shrouded in complete mystery. Recent findings suggest that the pilot and her assistant did not crash into the ocean then, but landed on the deserted island of Nikumaroro, where bones and a plate from the plane, believed to be theirs, were found. But this record is not about a mystery, it tells about flying, trust in new technologies, aviation and radio, which, however, do not solve real problems. The ending, where the philharmonic really thunders and the sound is pressurized, has a real tragic emotion in it.
The Wrong Way from Laurie Anderson’s new album features Anohni. Photo: Tim Knox | Video: Nonesuch Records
In the era of electronic seniors
Laurie Anderson won her first ever Grammy, the American Academy of Music Award, for her 2018 album Landfall, where the experience of a New York City crippled by Hurricane Sandy served as the basis for a meditation on loss and extinction.
Perhaps we can decently express the suspicion that she received the award more for “everything”, for the whole of her wonderful work, than for this modest record, which is mostly instrumental and only a little includes what makes Laurie Anderson unique: hypnotic, conceptual and foxy narrating.
The new Amelia doesn’t skimp on it, the other eye-catching center of gravity of the current record is a changing stream of strings, unrelenting and stable as the line behind a jet, but morphing with the sounds of aircraft engines, radios and the ocean.
Amelia is another sign that in 1977 Laurie Anderson can expect multimedia magic that will surprise, amuse and, this time through tragic fate, move us. The failed Cold War: it was shameful at its core, but it produced artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain whose opposition, subversion and wit are still in good shape today.
A final word about the Brno Philharmonic. With conductor Dennis Russell Davies, she has already recorded albums with compositions by Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt, released on the orchestra’s own label. Now they are joined by a title from Laurie Anderson, which is distributed worldwide by the New York firm Nonesuch. It is a satisfaction for the long-term dramaturgy of the Brno Philharmonic, which does not ignore the present and naturally invites the “Davies people” from their New York years together, which represents social capital par excellence. Let it last as long as possible.
Laurie Anderson: Amelia
Brno Philharmonic
Dennis Russell Davies – dirigent
Nonesuch Records 2024