Laurie Anderson: Big Science

Thanks to this wretched, all-consuming report, I've not had a chance to listen to this record all the way through. But what I have heard still gets me going the way it used to.

Even more than yesterday's album, the ideas, elliptical as they are, tickle my neurons like little else. And not just my neurons. At the same time as I had Big Science on heavy rotation, I fell in love, and then had my heart broken. It's not the kind of album you normally think of as the soundtrack to a love affair, is it? But then she and I did have our psycholinguistics tutorials together (with the great Stephen Monsell, possibly my favourite supervisor, though he very quickly sussed that I was just a journeyman student), and Marslen-Wilson's cohort model of spoken word recognition is more or less applicable to the way the lines of It Tango gradually unfurl, so that you have to re-parse them repeatedly: "She said: It takes. It takes one. It takes one two. It takes one to know one." No, really, it is.

Then there's that final line, quoted sometime after 3am when the white wine box has been squeezed dry, the ashtray is overflowing, and being gushingly cheesy no longer seems to matter, "Your eyes. It's a day's work just looking into them." Or perhaps I hoped the cheesiness was redeemed because I was quoting Laurie Anderson after all. Weeks later — yes, it was only weeks — I tried to rehearse my bitterness by quoting another track, "I no longer love your sweaters / I no longer love the way you hold your pens and pencils." But the fact was I did love them. I still do.

That's far from all there is to this record, though. It takes me back to the time when I didn't see albums either as light entertainment or as a stepping-off point into the sublime; they were the most accurate and insightful commentary on what it was like to be alive at that moment in time. Where are our cities going? Is technology changing our cognition so that we make decisions like a digital switch? Are we getting the Family, the Corporation and the State mixed up? And just what is the fabric of space? I was 20 and these questions seemed important then. I was convinced that the answers could be found here, even if they were in code. Here, and in films like True Stories, Eno's video sculptures that I was mentioning yesterday, and Christopher Lasch's The Minimal Self. Back then even the NME didn't have much to say about Laurie Anderson, and, along with those Robert Fripp Musician articles I mentioned, I would go to the university library to hunt down the articles about her in Artforum — my best hope of cracking the code, though not much use as it turned out.

I praised the wonderful sound of Mister Heartbreak, but this record is even more extraordinary. Harsher and not as attractive, but all the more unique for that: I can't think of, or imagine, anything else that sounds like this, David Van Tieghem's autonomic percussion, the coarse and abrasive horns, unruly bagpipes (!), and violin that veers between grating and exquisite beauty. That's before we get onto the voices. I know I'm digging myself deeper with every fanciful adjective, so let me just mention one other sound: the soft baying howl that opens the title track Big Science; is it animal, human, machine, or some illicit splicing of all three?

It's cold outside. Don't forget your mittens.

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