“It’s really beautiful”: the album Laurie Anderson calls her mantra
Laurie Anderson carries this quite omniscient artistic quality about her. She is an all-knowing embodiment of the avant-garde and a master puppeteer of the theatre of performance. To that end, her command of creative outlets displays an enchanting hold of power, charisma, and surprise—not least in her unexpected breakout mainstream chart success with ‘O Superman’ in 1981.
But beneath the high point of her most commercial appeal, there is a whole underworld of Anderson’s most beguiling and bemusing works to explore. Not only was the artist a stronghold of the avant-garde, but she was also a pioneer of electronic music; her production techniques have become the subject of such reverence mainly due to the fact that she invented them herself. Trailblazer is often a term used too lightly, but it deserves every ounce of its weight when bestowed upon Anderson.
In that sense, when it comes to delving into her own sonic tastes, it’s no real surprise that Anderson’s picks are as artistic and wide-ranging as they are delectably interesting. When discussing her favourite avant-garde albums, however, she singled out one specific record as taking on a special aural presence in her psyche, and that has become an incantation in her life forever.
She previously told Classic Album Sundays that among her top records was William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, a hauntingly resonant work that, to Anderson, is “basically a mantra. I treat it as ambient music of a crumbling kind; it’s really beautiful.”
The context of the album’s creation goes a long way in explaining its mass appeal to avant-garde audiences, with Anderson clearly one of the keenest among them. Its social background was one of blatant abject horror, but from that travesty, Basinski developed a sound that encompassed heartbreak while also finding beauty in its deepest pain.
Basinski’s original concept of the album came about almost by accident after he stumbled upon old recordings he had made on tapes back in the 1980s. But noticing that the quality had deteriorated when he went to play them, he became intrigued by the distorted sounds that they produced instead. Making this the basis of the record in place of his original idea, on September 11th, 2001, the very day Basinski finished the project, he looked out the window of his New York home to see the Twin Towers being attacked in front of him. This layer of tragedy and emotion became one of the album’s most celebrated and spectral qualities and made it a staple of ambient music for the rest of time.
For Anderson, as an elite of the avant-garde, influences are everywhere and can often be found in the unlikeliest or starkest of places. Basinski clearly agrees with that fact, as the power of his most esteemed artistic output manages to epitomise the chaos in society into one definitive sound. Works with such historical and sonic significance are always bound to leave an impression, but the seismic impact that Basinski’s Disintegration Loops has had on the rest of her life and career is evident for all to see.
