Big Science [Enhanced, Original recording remastered]

"Big Science" is an intense experience. It is also one of the greatest records I've ever heard. Laurie Anderson's ability to touch emotions with pure sound and rhythm is a tribute to her discipline and technical mastery. The sparse clarity of her word-and-sound-scapes leads you curiously on to places you never knew existed! Well, that's what I reckon anyway. Alf agrees with me. Don't cheat yourself - listen to it all in one sitting with the phone off the hook and a do not disturb notice on your door. You may find it bewildering and irritating. It's not pop. You can dance to it. I do! 5 stars and counting.

UK listeners of a certain age will, of course, either love or loathe Laurie Anderson on the strength of her unlikely 1981(?) hit, O Superman. That mammoth track forms the literal centrepiece of this extraordinary record, but is also quite unrepresentative. Laurie Anderson is no one-trick pony.

Every track on this album has its own soundscape and character. Sonically highly experimental (we jump from howling dogs on Track 2 to bagpipes on Track 3), the charm of Anderson's very warm-hearted art lies in the vocal performances. Whilst the music/noises on each track can be somewhat challenging, the largely spoken lyrics draw you into a filmic world that's far from cold or 'difficult'. Subtle humour, of the type that the Yanks do best, is laced through these songs.

Ultimately, Laurie Anderson is perhaps not trying to say anything startlingly profound about life's big questions (as some - not amongst these reviews - have suggested) but takes delight in illuminating little corners of life that tell us a lot about mankind's foibles, occasional failings and overwhelming humanity. She starts the album with the tannoy musings of a pilot about to attempt a crash-landing, and ends it with the heart-melting line "Your eyes. It's a day's work just looking into them.". How does she do that?

Laurie Anderson's roots were clearly in art, her years prior to the release of 'Big Science' taking in performance, art criticism, unreleased avant garde music, and her path crossing with such luminaries as Philip Glass, William S Burroughs, Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg. The album itself was an odd one, a major label distillation of Anderson's stage presentation 'United States I - IV' - all of which were eventually released as a box set of live recordings a few years later (...something I'd like to see reissued on compact disc). 'Big Science' is a record that sounded revolutionary and forward thinking back then, in between, and right about now. This remastered edition sounding even better, sounding like the future, and the kind of record that you can use to dismiss major label pseudo-experimentation like 'Kid A' by Radiohead.

In the UK, 'Big Science' and Laurie Anderson are probably best known for the accidental hit single 'O Superman (For Massanet)', which was a hit after being championed by the late, great John Peel. It also had a very odd video that I found strangely reassuring - 'O Superman' has to be one of the strangest hit singles of all time, from its central loop of someone taking a half-breath (...uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhetc...) to Anderson's oblique spoken word, to the vocoding effects on the vocals, and music that shifts in from the background to the fore (...one part really reminds me of parts of the soundtrack to 'Koyaanisqatsi' by Philip Glass). It's hypnotic stuff and I can understand completely why a 60-something co-worker of mine used to play it taped off the radio in the car (& nothing else) back in the 80s. It connects with people, proving that this type of avant garde/avant classical music isn't just for pretentious types, hip snobs, or those au fait with the usual suspects: Cage, Glass, Reich...

But there is more to Big Science than 'O Superman', which is only one of its nine delights. The LP opens with the very strange 'From the Air', which fuses Anderson's use of vocoder and farfisa and her central rap, with some tight alien funk worthy of the second side of Remain in Light and jazz elements played by Bill Obrecht and Peter Gordon. The jazz elements, spoken word approach and the tale of a descending plane were to be influential, would The The's 1986 single 'Sweet Bird of Truth' exist without it? Anderson does some great call/response thing, shifting from the Captain of a falling plane to playing a game of 'Anderson Says' - a black box recorder on the dancefloor? I recall reading an American review of this LP that saw it as a prediction of 9/11, which is rubbish, but it's interesting how words can anticipate events, or be read around them, words like: "We are all going down, together", "And then catch yourself from falling," and " I am in a burning building and I got to go..."

The title track sounds like a more electronic take on the aforementioned Philip Glass soundtrack, with an opening werewolf moan, and lyrics that feel like relatives of books like America by Baudrillard and City of Quartz, the kind of thing that Jeff Tweedy tried on a few tracks on 'a ghost is born', like "Golden cities. Golden towns." Anderson was saying "This must be the place" before Talking Heads did with their charming 'Naive Melody', the description of new shopping malls, locale for the new sports center, and a drive-in bank sound like the future that was making itself more apparent in the 1980s. I recall walking around a bright, white shopping arcade in Cheltenham in 1984 and being amazed at its white brightness, the mirrors, the vast escalator, the glass lifts etc Not that's what the song is about, or is it? Any song that has the refrain "Big science/Hallelujah/Yodellayheehoo" has to be wonderful, hasn't it?

Next up is 'Sweaters', a song that may throw some, sounding like the bagpipe nonsense Tom Waits experimented with on Swordfishtrombones a year later and the odder parts of Kate Bush's quite odd The Dreaming, another wonderfully strange (and strangely wonderful) LP released in 1982. Anderson raps "I no longer..." against certain factors...'Sweaters' is brief as is the next track 'Walking & Falling', which is just Anderson alone speaking over a minimal electronic soundtrack, sounding like cut-up poetry, this song is most effective at night, round about dreaming...

Another highlight of Big Science remains 'Born, Never Asked', which is effective after the minimal track that precedes it, Anderson opening the piece with the kind of spoken words you'd expect from David Lynch: "It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds. And more has all arrived at the same building at more or less the same time. And they were all free. And they were all asking themselves the same question: What is behind the curtain?" The song itself is pretty much the same minimilist violin/marimba piece, suitably hypnotic as it shifts from the spoken word section to the minimal classical, aided with Anderson's vocal, "You were born. And you're so free. So happy birthday." 'Born, Never Asked' does have parts that sound a little like the drones of bands like Silver Apples and Spacemen 3, so it's not surprising that Jason Pierce - a member of the latter, influenced by the former - cited this LP and later covered this track on Spiritualized Electric Mainline's 'Pure Phase.'

Following 'O Superman' is the very odd 'Example # 22', which is probably the most complex track here, a mass of jazz und woodwind, with what sound like cut-in tapes akin to what Holger Czukay was doing on 1979's Movies. I recall people being confounded by some of the lyrics to Tilt by Scott Walker when that LP was released in 1995, what did people think of lines on this track like "Beispiele paranormaler Tonbandstimmen" or "Beispiel Nummer zweiundzwanzig", even if they spoke some German, or read the translations beneath? There is poetry, some discourse on language and sound, ringing bells, and a feeling like pop. & a feeling like art too - there is no way, like 'O Superman', that 'Example #22' could be considered pop. But it sounds like pop to me; and when everyone is reminding us how out there Bjork is, remind them of 'Big Science' and Laurie Anderson. Just for me...

'Let X=X', which originally appeared in ARTFORUM in February 1982, has similar marimba to the title track and the closest vocal to 'O Superman' here, seeming to fuse with the closing 'It Tango' though I love the tromobones that come in towards the end. Reminding you that in part, this is a jazz album, or jazz of the future, coming from the place where Coleman, Get Up With It-Miles, and Cecil Taylor were maybe voyaging to. You know, just before jazz died and Sting hired all the musicians. This reissue on Nonesich comes remastered, with a tweaked cover, liner notes, and a few bonus tracks in the form of an alternate version of 'O Superman' and 'Walk the Dog', which also featured on the United States box-set and in performances pre-Big Science.

Big Science is one of those albums that I knew I'd like, from the cover alone: it looked like the future, of more accurately, a future I would like to be a part of. Big Science sounded great the first time I heard it, which would have been on a tape. Big Science sounded great when I upgraded to CD, and sounded great everytime I played it...and sometimes more. Big Science is one of those albums that I can play from beginning to end and repeat over and over. Big Science influenced Spacemen 3, Jarvis Cocker, Peter Gabriel, Spiritualized Electric Mainline, Prince, The The, Radiohead, Bjork, The Art of Noise and a mass of others. Big Science is a classic if we're talking about influence, and a classic if we're not. Big Science, a cult classic from 1982 and still the sound of the future; a definite Desert Island Disc and an album I'll be more than happy to buy again. As William S Burroughs said, "Wouldn't you?"