Laurie Anderson
United States Live

THE REVIEW

Electronic Spoken Word.

A sound show recorded and enclosed in a box of 4 CDs (or 5 LPs). A colossal work that, in its complete edition, exceeded 8 hours. But I am wasting breath; I think many of you know Anderson (Big Science especially, it is the album that most closely resembles this one.)

But let's proceed in order, in the first part (19 tracks), the most spoken and the one with the least music, the bizarre composition for violin Born, Never Asked stands out (also included in Big Science but here in a much better performance).
"A city that repeats itself endlessly, hoping something will stay in its mind"

The second part (19 tracks), in my opinion the best, includes known and new tracks. Among the known ones, standouts include O Superman (in an excellent performance, pity for the applause and the audience's coughs) and Let X=X (ditto); among the new tracks Reverb (sounds coming from amplified glasses - can you imagine Anderson hitting her head to "play" this track?) and Violin Walk. It also includes a version of Language is a Virus different from the one in Home of the Brave but equally beautiful.
"Hearing your name is better than seeing your face"

The third part (21 tracks) is the strangest and most experimental, it contains a beautiful track about Indians titled Hey Ah, vocal experiments are the protagonists of this part, which concludes with the track Big Science (unfortunately not up to the studio version).
"I dreamed that I had to take an exam in a dairy on another planet"

The fourth and final part (19 tracks) musically reminds me of Mr Heartbreak. It contains a version of Blue Lagoon superior to the studio one and a very strange version of Sweaters. It also contains the famous Lighting Out for the Territories in which she wore headlamps on her eyes and interpreted the text by moving through the audience and leaving the stage.
"You are observing enlarged facsimiles of human sperm"

Bizarre, unique, splendid, for those who love Anderson's early works (from Big Science to Home of the Brave), this album is absolutely unmissable.
I do not recommend it to those who, like me, love to listen to CDs in one go without pauses and cannot fall in love with just one or two songs; with this album, gentlemen, you risk going crazy.