REVIEW: Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet

CONCERT
Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet
Perth Concert Hall

REVIEW: Ray Purvis

It's hard to believe that these two legendary forces of American avant-garde music have never worked together before now. Yet Laurie Anderson's new multimedia work, Landfall: Scenes From My New Novel, that premiered earlier this month in the US, is the first time she's collaborated with the equally provocative experimental classical ensemble, the Kronos Quartet.

Since becoming widely known in 1981 via the pulsing tape-loop hit, O Superman, Anderson has partnered with such radically different artists as William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Brian Eno and her husband, Lou Reed.

On a different creative plane, musical mavericks the Kronos Quartet have spent the past 40 years engaged in collaborative projects with Steve Reich, Astor Piazzolla, Asha Bhosle, Henryk Gorecki and many more.

On Wednesday night, these pioneering experimentalists joined their distinctive musical personalities to present the Australian premiere of their new work that examined the power of language - as well as the mysteries of life.

"I have hoped that Laurie Anderson would write for Kronos since first encountering her work 30 years ago," explains the quartet's founder, David Harrington, in the concert program.

The masterful 70-minute musical, visual and electronic performance was a spellbinding, almost dream-like experience. Short musical passages were woven together over a hypnotic score expertly played by Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello). The entire work was full of humanity, sly humour and was never boring.

In a remarkable display of unity, both musical forces played to their own strengths. Framed against an effective backdrop of spotlights, the quartet, in semi-classical mode, provided a gorgeous droning, melodic and occasionally dissonant soundscape. Anderson put aside the grand visuals of her performance art - no light coming out of her mouth or slapping her head like a drum - to play the electric violin and added sound textures from her compact bank of electronic equipment.

Her weird tales and cultural critiques included ruminations on hurricane Sandy advancing on New York, our eternal fascination with stars and galaxies ("They're up there in the sky, nameless, as though we've never been here at all"), a job she once had where she was asked to make a hotel lobby sound b-i-g-g-e-r than it was and the phonetics of the letter "aleph", the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet.

"Don't you hate it when people want to tell you about their dreams," she confided with her hypnotic, almost disbelieving pitch - before going on to list examples of her own dreams. Later, while narrating a story about being in a Dutch karaoke bar trying to sing in Korean, she raced through the sentences, then slowed the last one down for dramatic impact: "and-suddenly-the-software-crash-

sh-sh-sh-ed." It was real electrifying stuff.

She was at her most engaging when her voice that was distorted by a vocoder to sound scaringly like the basso-profundo of a male anthropology teacher-meets-Darth Vader, meditated on the tireless disappearance of the species. "99.9 per cent of all species that once existed are now extinct," she dryly intoned. The effect was like being an unwilling eyewitness to the death of humanity.

The huge screen at the back of the stage continually flashed words and hieroglyphics that popped up in response to the quartet's droning notes. For much of the time you had to choose between what was being spoken and what was written.

But this was all part of Anderson's fascination with language and the idea of combining music and text in radical new ways.

The new custom-built technology that integrated so smoothly with the playing and narration came to prominence when the quartet's Sherba moved to the front of the stage plucking and bowing his violin and triggering text that flashed at lightning speed across the screen.

It gave the impression that the instrument was actually talking.

When it was all over the audience's overwhelmingly positive response was proof, if any was needed, that this long overdue collaboration of two of the world's premier performance artists was without doubt a once-in-a-lifetime experience.