Experiments in Haunting: The album Laurie Anderson called an avant-garde “mantra”
The landscape of experimental and avant-garde music is littered with strange, bizarre, and otherworldly projects which challenge the conventions and inherent values of ‘normal’ music. A figure who is more aware of this fact than most is Laurie Anderson. Ever since her early days performing within the vibrant scene of 1970s New York, Anderson has entrenched herself in the noble pursuit of musical experimentation, producing some of the finest avant-garde compositions of modern times in the process.
New York City has long since been a host for strange and innovative new genres prior to Anderson’s involvement in the local scene. However, it was she, alongside a few other notable figures – Pauline Oliveros, for instance – who really carved out a legitimate space for avant-garde composition in the city. In contrast to virtually all other music scenes at the time, Anderson and company were not pursuing a sound that would ever be played on the radio or feature in the Billboard Top 100; they were working on something incredibly inventive and entirely new.
Anderson’s work was much more than music in that sense. She was, and still is, challenging the status quo laid out by musical theory and practice. Her tireless work breaking down barriers in the pursuit of something truly original, in turn, inspired countless other artists to follow suit. Every modern musical artist who has touched upon the influence of the avant-garde and experimental music scene is likely indebted to the work of the Chicago-born composer.
That is not to say, however, that Anderson embarked upon this avant-garde journey on her lonesome. Along the way, the composer found a wealth of inspiration in the works of other inventive artists, ranging all the way from Frank Zappa to Beth Anderson. However, a particular favourite of Laurie Anderson, in more recent years, has been the Californian composer William Basinski.
From the early days of his career, Basinski had been interested in the work of minimalists, finding particular solace in creating tape loops and using physical media to distort recorded sounds. His magnum opus arrived during the early 2000s when he unveiled Disintegration Loops, which quickly became a favourite of Anderson’s.
In fact, during an appearance on Classic Album Sundays, Anderson went as far as to say, “Disintegration Loops is basically a mantra, I treat it as ambient music of a crumbling kind, it’s really beautiful.”
Disintegration Loops was created when Basinski began to digitalise tape recordings he had made back in the 1980s. At the time, he noticed that the deterioration of these tapes over time had changed the sounds recorded onto them. Taking this theme to its extreme, Basinski leaned into the haunting, deteriorated sounds of these tapes, creating ambient yet uneasy loops. “Like a lot of artists, Steve Reich in particular,” Anderson shared, “He was interested in the disintegration of audio tape, and that’s how this piece was created.”
Adding another layer of complexity and atmosphere to the record was the very fact that Basinski had been working on the recording while in New York. Upon finishing, the composer gazed out of the window only to see the extreme horror of the 9/11 attacks unfurling in front of his eyes. In fact, the album cover for the project was taken from the composer’s footage of the attacks, which he recorded from a rooftop in Brooklyn. Thus adding an entirely new layer of potency to his work.
Anderson herself has been no stranger to involving historically significant events within her work. Only this year, the avant-garde pioneer constructed an entire album surrounding the life of the female aviator Amelia Earhart, exploring her journey and its importance through suitably experimental music. As you can see, therefore, Anderson never stopped absorbing influences and expanding upon her extensive repertoire of experimental and avant-garde music.
