Empty Places: A Performance

by Laurie Anderson

A photographic memoir, accompanied by the complete text, of avante-garde innovator Laurie Anderson's "Empty Spaces" tour includes songs from her album "Strange Angels" and some never-before-seen material

Genres: Music, Art, Poetry

124 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1991

About the author

Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson) is an American experimental performance artist and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance art piece in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance art activities. She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman," reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave.

She has also invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a "tape-bow violin" that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a "talking stick", a six-foot long, batonlike MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds.

Reviews

[Ben Houge]

For a pretty extreme Laurie Anderson fan, this book, which I read long ago, was kind of just okay. This is my least favorite period of her early work, corresponding roughly to the Strange Angels album, if memory serves. It's kind of bluntly political, lacking the poetic ambiguity of her strongest pieces. Check out Songs and Stories from the Nerve Bible instead!

[Natalie]

Interesting. I wish there was a DVD of the show to go along with the book.

[Clove]

She’s so fucking fascinating to me