Laurie Anderson

United States, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, assembled songs, spoken stories, altered voices and projected images into a portrait of a country. Its four parts addressed transportation, politics, money and love through shifting vignettes rather than a single linear plot. Anderson's calm delivery is crucial to the tension between ordinary language and strange situations. Explore the live recording for the links between passages: the theatrical force comes from accumulation, with each story changing the context of the next.