Anderson and Kronos Quartet

For a portion of Laurie Anderson’s “Landfall,” all I could think about was how I couldn’t remember the name of the tree people in Lord of the Rings (they are called the Ents, as Google kindly informed me afterward). The work itself was strange enough—segmented into a variety of smaller pieces with uneasy, sometimes abrupt transitions and a frenetic, lulling blend of electronic and acoustic sound—until Anderson began to speak in a male voice. I initially tried to understand what she was saying, something about how 99.9% of all species that have lived are now extinct. I remembered that the piece was inspired by Hurricane Sandy and realized all of a sudden that Anderson’s voice, with its slow, methodical dips and turns, was just like that of the speaking trees in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings. As I pushed back into my memory, Anderson’s rhythmic voice began to lose its grasp on language; the words became sounds became part of the music, and Anderson herself ceased to be a woman but instead morphed into a living instrument.

I eventually gave up on my memory, lost in the whirlwind of carefully placed sound.  Combining Anderson’s electric violin, vocals, keyboard, and synthesizers with the technical virtuosity of the Kronos Quartet, the performance was in the Bing Concert Hall and took full advantage of the hall’s multicolored lighting, vast curved surfaces, and acoustical prowess. The five musicians were individually spot lit in a semi-circle in the center of the floor. Around them, the lights changed from blue to green to pink to orange, helping to delineate the smaller pieces within “Landfall.” Words, which were written in different fonts and devolved slowly into representations or even different languages, were projected upon two of the curved walls, scrolling and flashing to the beat of the music.  More traditional melodies collapsing into strange riffs and atonal scratches as the musicians hammered away on their instruments. Anderson pressed pedals under her keyboard to summon up a deep bass.

The pieces ranged from mournful to nostalgic to hopeful. Anderson spoke to the audience in several, sometimes as a spoken word poet, sometimes as a stand-up comic, creating a jarring experience for an audience that took her first poem about disaster seriously but could not reconcile her story about being in a Dutch karaoke bar with the horrors of Hurricane Sandy. Still, I laughed when she joked about how we don’t really want to hear other people’s dreams, especially when they can’t remember what happened themselves.

Ultimately, the piece lacked the unity I wanted it to have. While it came back several times to the same theme, the order of the pieces appeared random. A climactic moment came when the violist stepped forward and played a solo as projected words flashed to the rhythm of his riffs—but it had no resolution, instead spiraling outward into tangents of sound and voice, coalescing into a electronic-rock ballad for a moment before docilely accompanying the text.  Nevertheless, the audience clapped long enough for the musicians to return for an encore bow.