On album "Amelia"

Laurie Anderson pays homage to great US aviation pioneer

The great Laurie Anderson follows in the footsteps of a true feminist pioneer.

(Bild: Warner Music, Ebru Yildiz)

To describe Laurie Anderson as a musician does not do her justice. Born Laura Philips Anderson in 1947 in a small town in Illinois, the artist is a worthy representative of the rare species of "multi-talented": she sings, plays strange, self-designed violins, she causes a stir in the cultural scene with her special performances and she is just as at home in the literary scene as she is in the film scene. Now she is releasing a new concept album.

On "Amelia", Anderson proves that she is a gifted storyteller. In the 22 spoken word tracks, she deals with the last flight of American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. In 1937, five years after Earhart's spectacular record flight across the Atlantic, she wanted to set another record: to be the first person to fly around the world at the equator. On May 21, 1937, she set off on her pioneering feat, but six weeks later she took off from New Guinea for her final leg - and has been missing ever since.

No room for light fare
Anderson has captured the tragedy of this flight of no return in almost two dozen miniatures: Sound collages, soundtrack-like sequences, melodies and sound snippets in which Anderson attempts to completely immerse himself in the emotional and mental world of the female pilot during her flight 87 years ago. This is not light fare. Neither musically nor in terms of content. The sparsely arranged tracks exude a dark foreboding that infiltrates even the confident tracks with almost conventional melodies such as "Brasil", "India And On Down To Australia" and "Road To Mandalay".

Her tracing of the unfinished record flight is most poignant in the track "Broken Chronometers" - an inner monologue by Earhart in which she discusses her poor physical condition and her even worse chances of landing. However, she always wants to put a stop to the negative thoughts with an energetic "Stop!" put a stop to them.

Search without success
It could have been something like this when Earhart sent out her last radio message at 8.40 a.m. on July 2, long after she had been wandering over the Pacific. Shortly afterwards, the US government launched a massive search operation involving 64 aircraft and eight warships. Over two weeks, more than 400,000 square meters of the Pacific were searched. She was then declared "missing, presumed dead".

Anyone who listens to this grandiose radio play, created with the help of musicians such as Rob Moose, Marc Ribot and the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, may find it hard to believe that Laurie Anderson has also served the mainstream perfectly before: in 1981, she landed a top hit in the UK with the harmoniously pleasing sound play "O Superman".

Cult artist duo
However, the avant-garde pioneer had her heyday from the mid-1990s onwards, when she and her boyfriend and later husband Lou Reed made a sensational artistic couple. Almost like John Lennon and Yoko One, the two fueled the New York art scene with all kinds of surprises until Reed's death in 2013.

Despite her advanced age, the artist with the distinctive hedgehog hairstyle remains agile and versatile: in 2015 she made the feature film "Heart Of A Dog", in 2016 she was appointed to the competition jury of the Venice International Festival, in 2018 she won a Grammy for her collaboration with the Kronos Quartet and in 2020 she was elected a member of the American Academy Of Arts And Letters.