New Music From Laurie Anderson, SUSS
Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet
Landfall
(Nonesuch)
Periodically, this writer revisits Orson Welles’ sobering monologue in the film F for Fake about the Chartres Cathedral (an “anonymous glory”) and how humanity’s work—“in stone, in paint, in print” —may survive for years but eventually must succumb: “Everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash.”
On her new album Landfall, made in collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Laurie Anderson contemplates loss after Hurricane Sandy, which flooded her basement: “All the things I had carefully saved all my life becoming nothing but junk. And I thought how beautiful, how magic and how catastrophic.”
Landfall was released concurrently with Anderson’s new career retrospective book “All the Things I Lost in the Flood”, which has a title similar to that of a book mentioned in Landfall called “All the Disappeared Animal Life Forms of the World”; Anderson points out that over 99 percent of all animal species to ever exist are now extinct.
In its live incarnation, Landfall features a visual aspect, with projections of an English-based code called “erst” —an acronym for “electronic representation of spoken text” —but in its recorded form, it provides less stimulation for the listener. Compared with much of Anderson’s previous work, Landfall is not as densely packed, with frequent instrumental passages—often gorgeously ominous or meditative—between the spoken-word segments.
As Anderson explains in her latest book, “Music lets the mind drift, and reminds you of the temporary, provisional and interpretive nature of reality.” In line with this, dreams are a key concept of Landfall, and provide some of the album’s humorous and bizarre moments; nothing is explicitly described as being real or fantasy, and Anderson has the ability to provoke thought without being too obvious about making a point.
While listening to Landfall, this writer couldn’t help but think about friends who were devastated by the 2011 tornadoes in the region; hours were spent sifting through rubble, trying to discern what was salvageable and which items—and memories locked within—might be forever lost. The music provides space to wander within Landfall, and Anderson calls music “the ultimate art form of loss” since it is “immaterial and ecstatic.”
Ruined objects floating in a flooded basement are now just words in a book or an album: “old keyboards, thirty projectors, props from old performances.” But it is this transmutation that allows them to temporarily escape their own mortality, and like any translation—between languages, digital formats or art forms—something may be lost, but also something is gained.
SUSS
Ghost Box
(suss.bandcamp.com)
After hearing the debut album Ghost Box from the instrumental NYC ambient country quintet SUSS, one wonders why more of this kind of music doesn’t exist—while traditional country often concerns heartbreak and troubles, SUSS’s approach brings to mind vast landscapes and even spacescapes. The gorgeous opener “Wichita” never strays from its single chord, relying on tiny bits assembled together—a whispery pedal steel guitar flourish, an upward three-note electric guitar sequence, echoing guitar sighs. It could be the placid soundtrack to an opening shot of a western film, with a sense of calm and an appreciation of nature.
Apparently, the band’s catalyst Bob Holmes wanted to illuminate the connections that certain contemporary acts (Boards of Canada and My Bloody Valentine in particular) have to traditional roots music that might not be obvious; these connections are not restraints, though, as SUSS demonstrates.
Their expansive style goes beyond the simple “ambient country” label, using familiar elements and instruments to bend genres into amorphous, evocative pieces. It’s an acknowledgment and also a challenge, suggesting a complicated western mythology but occasionally being disorienting, both in the temporal and the geographic realms.
“Late Night Call” belongs as much in the psychedelic and kosmische Musik categories as it does in the ambient and country buckets, with electric guitar harmonics, fiddle scrapes, whistling and a spacey feel. On tracks like “Rain,” simple chord strums are felt deeply, suggesting immense expanses and opportunities.
The album’s second half becomes more difficult to pin down, as electronic tones and keyboard notes lay gently aside Morricone-esque guitar lines, the soft, tentative tapping of a hammered dulcimer and artificial time-keeping blips. The exploratory spirit is even more vague on “Gunfighter,” with sample snippets, a piercing harmonica that resembles a power tool and a dobro twang.
There’s both comfort and bewilderment on Ghost Box, perhaps echoing the symbiotic paradox from an embrace of both tradition and innovation.