“How many people can do everything?” asked Lou Reed in 2003. He was explaining to the television host Charlie Rose why Laurie Anderson was the “absolute perfect person” to be NASA’s first artist-in-residence. (She would also be its last.) By then, Anderson had been a visual artist, filmmaker, and unlikely pop musician. She once read David Bowie’s mind; she hung suspended upside-down over Coney Island; she taught her dog to play piano. With the folks at NASA, Anderson toured the Hubble Space Telescope and met astronauts and nanotechnologists, ultimately producing a poem called The End of the Moon, which she recited between violin interludes. Formally and conceptually grappling with colossal forces of the unknown, The End of the Moon is a fitting precedent to Anderson’s gripping collaboration with the revolutionary Kronos Quartet—a string quartet who also once worked with NASA and have in their four-decade career, you could say, done everything.
Both Anderson, a consummate New Yorker, and Kronos Quartet, from San Francisco, have been prolific interrogators of American power since the 1970s. In classical music, Kronos challenged the dominance of European-American composers, investigating world music, rock, and jazz; at times, they have played with projections of Occupy and the Arab Spring behind them, or collaborated with leftist historian Howard Zinn. In a 2014 interview, Kronos founder David Harrington said, “Of all the string quartets in the world, I’m intending to have the largest F.B.I. file.” But the greatest link between Anderson and Harrington might be their abilities to see the future.
Harrington dreamed of collaborating with Anderson for decades. But it was not until after the release of Anderson’s 2010 LP Homeland that Landfall began to take shape, first as a traveling live performance and now as a 30-track album of epic sweep. Composed by Anderson and featuring her spoken word, Landfall is a cycle of songs that observe the devastating wake of Hurricane Sandy through her eyes. Though much of Landfall was written before the third costliest storm in U.S. history ravaged the East Coast in October of 2012, Sandy dominates this intense work. It is the sound of a quintessential New Yorker processing a New York tragedy, salvaging something from the sad wreckage, internalizing the debris of a creative life, showing how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe.
The elegiac tracks of Landfall, most no longer than two or three minutes, are episodic fragments that can cut off abruptly, like photographs with torn or water-damaged edges. This gives Landfall a momentum and a grace that’s slightly askew. There is a celestial scope to these pieces, as if Anderson has composed a new cosmos where lies are not hidden, but rather laid bare; where we can decipher what is real. Anderson’s lucid spoken word combines with the quartet’s weeping elegance to portray the gravity of disaster, of seismic motion, of ominous anticipation, all with a gentle immediacy. By “Our Street Is a Black River,” Anderson begins her story: “From above, Sandy was a huge swirl that looked like the galaxies,” she states, and in her iconic way, she continues, “whose names”—pause—“I didn’t know.”
Anderson’s spatial phrasings convey a sense of steadiness in an increasingly precarious world. She speaks on only a handful of tracks, but her extended pauses are like deep breaths amid the exhausting act of processing. Here, the Kronos Quartet heighten her breaks to audacious effect, sometimes emulating the shape of drones, or ragas, or curled question marks, sometimes augmented by electronics. Anderson—who once turned the William S. Burroughs maxim “language is a virus” into song—has found fantastic collaborators in Kronos, who can say so much without language when language fails. On “The Electricity Goes Out and We Move to a Hotel,” there are no words but churning, paddling, involuntary movement; it is a resigned procession; you have to keep moving.
On “Everything Is Floating,” Anderson plainly describes how it felt to descend upon her waterlogged downtown basement after Sandy and see the muck of keyboards and projectors, papers and books, “all the things I had carefully saved all my life… becoming nothing but junk.” With this somber, dramatic, and yet peaceful music, she evokes another maxim she has repeated often, from her Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche: “Feel sad without actually being sad.” This is a survival guide, and maybe Landfall is, too.
Landfall seems to synthesize many of the concerns of Anderson’s life: language, technology, America’s gargantuan cons. And it all coalesces on “Nothing Left but Their Names,” an astounding nine-and-a-half-minute monologue in Anderson’s classic down-pitched vocal style. She catalogues extinct species such as spotted lizards, mastodons, and many kinds of sloths. Her meditation wanders through the imaginative power of words, how they can be superior to experience itself. But Anderson ends, profoundly, on the moon and the stars. “You know the reason that I really love the stars?” Anderson asks. “It’s that we cannot hurt them. We can’t burn them. We can’t melt them or make them overflow. We can’t flood them or blow them up… But we are reaching for them.” If natural disasters are wrapped up with the worst of humanity—the greed and consumption and violent men that keep greenhouse emissions rewiring the atmosphere; the forces of destruction that cause nature to combust upon itself—at least we still have the stars.
Simultaneously with Landfall, Anderson has released a career-spanning book of art and essays called All the Things I Lost in the Flood. In it, she recalls the wild discussions she had at NASA, like a 5,000-year plan to move all manufacturing, and its pollution, off the Earth. She also illuminates her 1981 hit “O Superman,” the electronic odyssey of a tune that transformed her into what she’s called an “anthropological” pop musician. “Here come the planes,” it goes, “They’re American planes.”
When Anderson sang it a few days after 9/11, she writes, “I had the eerie sensation of singing about the absolute present. Each time I revived the song people would say, ‘Did you just write this? It’s so much like what’s going on right now.’ They had forgotten that the current war has been going on for well over 30 years, every once in a while getting a new name: ‘The Gulf War,’ ‘The Iraq War,’ ‘The War on Terror.’” If climate change, a war against Earth, is to continue, Landfall is destined to retell the story of the next hurricane, the next perilous Sandy. Anderson still sees the future, but she starts by paying attention.
