wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

New Sounds

Saturday, September 11, 2004
  • Laurie Anderson, photo by Noah Greenberg
    Laurie Anderson (© Noah Greenberg)

    Program #2070

    Laurie Anderson's Live in New York was recorded a mere week after September 11, 2001, and the air of intensity is palpable throughout the two-disc set. Recorded at Town Hall, it includes ten songs from the 2001 CD Life on a String (Nonesuch), plus arrangements of earlier songs from her catalog, including "Let X=X," "Strange Angels," "Coolsville," and the early-1980s classic "O Superman." The latter tune, clothed in a new arrangement, sounds just as poignant as it did 20 years ago, if only because the 90 minutes leading up to it are filled with some of her most dreamlike, unnerving, and yet utterly human music. Selections from this monumental endeavor are the subject of this episode of New Sounds.

PROGRAM #2070, Laurie Anderson "Live At Town Hall" (First aired 9/10/02)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Laurie Anderson

Live at Town Hall, Sept. 19-20, 2001

Here With You [3:00]
Statue of Liberty [4:00]
Wildebeests [4:30]
Animals [3:00]
Life On A String [3:00]
Dark Angel [4:30]
Washington Street [5:00]
Beginning French [2:00]
O Superman [8:00]
Slip Away [5:30]
White Lily [2:30]
Love Among The Sailors [4:00]

Nonesuch Records, 2-CD set #79681**
www.nonesuch.com
More information on Laurie Anderson can be found at www.laurieanderson.com.


*, ** - Find the recordings you've heard - go to the New Sounds Recordings Information page

Leave a Comment

Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.

Your comment


* required
The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party.
 

Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.