Grappling with <i>Big Science</i>

jharv | July 19, 2007 12:25 pm
Nonesuch Records has reissued Laurie Anderson’s classic Big Science in time for its 25th birthday, and Anderson’s downtown jumble of tape manipulations, industrial sonorities, proto-electronica, and performance art shtick sounds as wonky and forward-thinking as when I first heard it a decade ago in college. (From the same teacher who first played me Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). I have no idea where that guy is now, but I owe him a few drinks.) The reissue includes, among other bonuses, the video for U.K. No. 2 hit “O Superman”–the eight-minute journey into sound whose disembodied, floating phonemes anticipate everything from the Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” to the Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II–which is also posted above, thanks to some kind soul at YouTube.