BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Laura Phillips Anderson
Description: Vocalist, USA
Known For: Known outside the art world in 1981 with the single “O Superman,”
Instruments: Voice, Violin, Keyboards
Music Styles: Rock
Location: United States of America
Date Born: 5th June 1947
Location Born: Glen Ellyn, Illinois, United States of America
CONTACT DETAILS
Web Site: http://www.laurieanderson.com
Other Links: For other links about this entertainer click on the Links button above
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Laurie Anderson
An American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles.
Laura Phillips “Laurie” Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single “O Superman” reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.
Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. 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. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.
Anderson started dating Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013.
Anderson was born in Glen Ellyn, Illinois on June 5, 1947, the daughter of Mary Louise (née Rowland) and Arthur T. Anderson. She graduated from Glenbard West High School. She attended Mills College in California, and eventually graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. Her first performance-art piece—a symphony played on automobile horns—was performed in 1969. In 1970, she drew the underground comix Baloney Moccasins, which was published by George DiCaprio. In the early 1970s, she worked as an art instructor, as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum, and illustrated children’s books[10]—the first of which was titled The Package, a mystery story in pictures alone.
1970s
She performed in New York during the 1970s. One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing the violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice; the performance ended only when the ice had melted away. Two early pieces, “New York Social Life” and “Time to Go,” were included in the 1977 compilation New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, along with works by Pauline Oliveros and others. Two other pieces were included on Airwaves, a collection of audio pieces by various artists. She also recorded a lecture for Vision, a set of artist’s lectures released by Crown Point Press as a set of 6 LPs.
Many of Anderson’s earliest recordings remain unreleased, or were only issued in limited quantities, such as her first single, “It’s Not the Bullet that Kills You (It’s the Hole)”. That song, along with “New York Social Life” and about a dozen others, were originally recorded for use in an art installation that consisted of a jukebox that played the different Anderson compositions, at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City. Among the musicians on these early recordings are Peter Gordon on saxophone, Scott Johnson on guitar, Ken Deifik on harmonica, and Joe Kos on drums. Photographs and descriptions of many of these early performances were included in Anderson’s retrospective book, Stories from the Nerve Bible.
During the late 1970s, Anderson made a number of additional recordings that were released either privately or included on compilations of avant-garde music, most notably releases by the Giorno Poetry Systems label run by New York poet John Giorno, an early intimate of Andy Warhol. Among the Giorno-released recordings was You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With, a double-album shared with Giorno and William Burroughs (the original release had one LP side for each artist, with the fourth side triple-grooved, one for each, so the listener would hear a different track, depending on the position of the needle). In 1978, she performed at The Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.
She was part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.
She mounted a succession of themed shows and composed a piece for Expo 2005 in Japan.
Anderson was awarded the 2007 Gish Prize for her “outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to humankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”
Albums include.
You’re the Guy I Want To Share My Money With (1981)
Big Science (1982)
Mister Heartbreak (1984)
United States Live (box set) (1984)
Home of the Brave (soundtrack album) (1986)
Strange Angels (1989)
Bright Red (1994)
The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995)
Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson Anthology (2000)
Life on a String (2001)
Live in New York (2002)