Avante What?

Now, the term Avante Garde is bandied about like some token or badge. Avante garde is in common perception inaccessable, abstract in the extreme and difficult. It seems to me though, that it really means "new". What is new? Interesting? What makes me prick up my ears and take

notice?

Laurie Anderson has been doing this thing for a long time now. She has worked with such luminaries as William S. Burroughs, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel. She has been NASA's first ever "Artist in Residence" Life on a String was borne of these experiences. She has produced multimedia stage productions, a film (Home of the Brave), she has tested explosives in a deserted car-park in Isreal ( I think it was there). She has a thing for Melville. She is probably one of my favourite artists.

She seems to refer to herself as a Storyteller more than a musician. It seems the music is part of a synergistic whole. The process of story telling for her seems to be a very dynamic thing. Her range of subject matter ranges from the mundane to the bizarre, and often an apparently bizarre perspective on the mundane. There is a piece that she did about the metal blobs produced by the Chrysler factory during a computer malfunction. She says that she perceives her job as an artist as that of a spy. She says her favourite listening posts are the phone banks at airports. Then she procedes to launch into a strange one-sided dialogue using a pitch bender on her voice. So much has she done and explored that cataloguing her work would be a difficult, both in volume and breadth.

I offer you a piece that was birthed during her Live USA tour. It has evolved over various performances and recordings. Here then is: