A Downtown Diva Does the ‘90s : Laurie Anderson gave ‘70s performance art a pop music twist in the ‘80s to huge acclaim. After five years of lying low, she’s making records again. The question is--can the queen of multimedia hip find a place in the new decade?

One of the first things you notice about Laurie Anderson, offstage, is the lack of . . . The Pause. She speaks plain ly, pleasantly, sometimes drifting off onto tangents, only to swerve back suddenly to the point at hand.

But you half-expect . . . The Pause. Her signature pause, lining the path to some incisive or mock-naive observation, or a cheeky non sequitur, has become a personal signifier. The Pause, co-opted from both stand-up comic shtick and chic ‘80s art-world irony, is central to the oft-imitated operative Laurie Anderson vocabulary.

The Pause lets you know that what you’re hearing may or may not be the gospel truth. It lets you know that behind that dimpled and spike-coiffed image may be an incurable trickster taking you for a ride.

There’s a danger of self-parody that Anderson, now in her late 40s, faces as she rejoins the cultural scene with the Tuesday release on the Warner Bros. label of “Bright Red,” her first album in more than four years ( see review, Page 92 ) . Not only has she had many imitators, but she’s repeated her act so often herself that her trademark idiosyncrasies threaten to become cliche.

Anderson burst into the ‘80s as a new kind of accessible conceptualist, with the surprise hit “O Superman.” Then came various projects that established her as the rare bird who leaped from the art world to the pop world.

Her large-scale early-’80s multimedia piece “United States: Part I-IV” combined song, projections and surreal theatrics. The music portion of the show became a landmark five-record set for Warner Bros. (1984). She also recorded “Big Science” (1982), “Mister Heartbreak” (1984), “Home of the Brave” (soundtrack to the 1986 film) and “Strange Angels” (1989) for the label.

Anderson carved an impressive swath through the ‘80s. But the question now: Is Anderson ready for the ‘90s--or vice versa?

Anderson’s place in SoHo is a spacious spread in a building overlooking the Hudson River. In timeless house-upstairs, shop-downstairs tradition, she lives on the sixth floor and works in her fully equipped home studio on the floor below. Her hardwood-floored flat is Spartan in decor, making such artifacts as a photo of the Dalai Lama, a koto on the wall and a pinata all the more conspicuous.

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Wearing jeans and a gray vest over a button-down white shirt, Anderson displays only one hint of flamboyance this day: her Neapolitan-hued sneakers. She smokes filter-less cigarettes and serves visitors cappuccino while unveiling the just-finished new album in the comforts of her home studio. A restless sort, she interrupts the interview to answer the phone and to deal with a number of guests dropping by.

A view of the river peeks out from behind her mixing console. Boats slice silently through the water below, almost dreamily. Listening to the freshly mixed new album, coated with the gauzy, ambient overlay that producer Brian Eno is known for, one can easily imagine the creative environment feeding the art.

In conversation, Anderson comes off candid, earnest, especially when discussing the nuts-and-bolts aspects of her work. But she also seems to have a keen ability to swerve off the subject, perhaps to maintain control of an interview. When the question of her hiatus from recording comes up, she skillfully brushes it aside, rambling about the lack of venues for video artists, or the promise of better living through the Internet.

In fact, she spent a year putting together a book, “Stories From the Nerve Bible,” which came out this spring, and has been doing various film projects.

Though Anderson’s roots are in the shock-tactical performance art scene of the ‘70s, her presentation has always been less about confrontation or archetype smashing than about an almost childlike wonder. She’s all about connections of dots, parts and ideas not normally linked. She plays violin but has filled the instrument with water or replaced strings with a tape head that played spoken bits of language.

She is never about one thing at any given time. She lives in the hyphens that inevitably pop up in descriptions of the real Laurie Anderson, as performance artist-pop singer-storyteller-poet-author-violinist-postmodern deconstructionist-multimedia conjurer. Androgynous, topical and yet universal, Anderson covers a lot of bases at once without ever getting stuck in one place.

Does this slippery tendency boil down to an aesthetic statement, a defense mechanism or both? Anderson seems to revel in her role as a hard-to-categorize cult heroine in pop music.

“If pop is the mainstream, I’m an offshoot,” she comments. “Maybe I’m a slightly parallel, smaller stream. In a way, I still feel like I’m someone from the art world who happens to be occasionally making records. I’m not exactly cranking them out,” she says, laughing.

“I appreciate Warner Bros. for that: They don’t ever call and say, ‘Are you making any music these days?’ It’s great. Well, also, I’m like a vanity artist for them, an in-house intellectual to be tolerated. I’m also a kind of catalogue artist. People might actually be interested in something from 10 years ago, since my records never creep up any chart. But they have a little life of their own, and I’m happy with that.

“I don’t care about selling a lot of records, because I never thought that the more people bought my records, the better it was. I would probably tend to think the opposite. I’m that much of a snob. Don’t get me wrong. I love pop culture. I find it entertaining but only on the level of something to criticize--in a way to be a gadfly and say, ‘Do you really think this is important?’ But you can’t just do that, because then you’re just a crank over on the side.”

But in this area, as in many others, Anderson displays her duality; while professing that she doesn’t care if she sells, she wants people to buy.

“Look, I could entertain myself very well here at home. I also like doing concerts. That would be fine,” she says. “But to make stuff, manufacture things that nobody buys? What’s the point in that?”

L ike her earlier albums, “Bright Red” is endearingly quirky and full of artful dodging, yet it seems more personal and darkly reflective. Where once Anderson sang of angels and made bemused commentaries about common experiences, on “Bright Red” there are demons afoot. She addresses darker subjects: AIDS (“Love Among the Sailors”), apocalypse (“Muddy River”), infidels (“Poison”), mortality (“World Without End”) and the bleary rush of time (“Same Time Tomorrow”).

As with everything else she does, Anderson’s “Stories From the Nerve Bible” strays from the straight line of orthodoxy, as a non-chronological collection and examination of her work thus far.

In an unorthodox promotional tour for the book, Anderson performed to a packed house at UCLA in April. Not only did she read from the book, but she also previewed material from “Bright Red,” armed with electronic violin and a keyboard. During the reading, she relied on electronic effects to enhance the storytelling aspect, at times using a booming male voice, as she often does in performance, sounding like an android version of Charles Kuralt.

When it finally came time to record “Bright Red,” the material came out in a relative torrent.

“I wrote very fast--25 songs in six weeks,” Anderson said. “I’ve never written that fast, lyrics-wise. I’ve written a lot of music pieces. I think it was because I had just finished this book, ‘Stories From the Nerve Bible,’ and I was really used to being on my computer.

“Also, when you do a book, you finally realize what’s been important to you--what are the things that you really want to say. I realize that they were always the same. There were stories and songs that were very short and really direct, very simple language, nothing fancy--a tilted, skewed version of what you’re looking at but still not oblique. It’s just ‘Here’s what happened. Listen to this.’

“They were very much about talking to someone. Conversation was a big theme on this album, and that’s where the duets came in.”

There are several duets on the album, including two with Phil Ballou and the chant-like “In Our Sleep” with Lou Reed, to whom Anderson has been romantically linked of late. But the most unusual duet features Anderson with Arto Lindsay on the unsettling title track, on which the two vocalists swap lyrics, word for word, melting into a mutant, dual-faceted persona.

“I wanted to do a duet that wasn’t just him-and-her. That song reminds me of ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ or something,” she says, referring to the 1961 Alain Resnais film. “It’s a weird situation of a couple who are sort of promising things to each other, and then there are odd, threatening things that happened. Then, in the middle, there’s the bit from the Bible, from Isaiah, about ‘the hairy ones will dance there.’ You’re thinking, ‘What is this?’

“One reason I placed it second on the album is that it’s a difficult piece. Originally, I thought maybe I should put it later when people are more used to the album. But then I thought, no, it has to be toward the beginning, because that’s so much what the record is about. If people have trouble with that, then they probably shouldn’t listen to the rest of it anyway. It’s the separate-the-men-from-the-boys track. If you don’t like this, don’t waste your time with the rest of it.”

The less-than-festive thematic thread of “Bright Red” came as something of a surprise to Anderson:

“When I actually looked at what they were about, they were all about the same thing--not just love but destruction, equally, either through memory or some cataclysmic thing. There’s a song called ‘Night in Baghdad.’ There was a CNN report in which they were saying that all this bombing stuff was so beautiful, like fireworks.

“Then it becomes a question of what’s beautiful. There is something gorgeous about destruction, and liberating too. Unless you’re the one who’s being destroyed. The end of that song ends up with the question ‘Did you ever love me?’ And the answer is ‘Only when you danced, so beautiful, it was like the Fourth of July.’ You think about war and love. Many of the songs were about that.”

Opening the album on an am bivalent note is “Speechless,” “about a symbiotic relationship that really went wrong.”

“One person can’t talk, and the other one ends up doing all the talking,” Anderson explains. “So the other person is in the passenger seat, unable to say a word. It’s a beautiful story by Annie Dillard. She saw an eagle fly down, with the skull of a weasel attached to its mouth. So she speculated that the eagle had gone down to attack the weasel, and the weasel had sunk its teeth into the eagle and held on until it rotted. It became this horrid albatross swinging away.”

Musicians on “Bright Red” include jazz-and-then-some drummer Joey Baron, Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, guitarist Adrian Belew and renowned New Music accordionist Guy Klucevsek.

“That was going to be the original instrumentation of the album,” Anderson says. “I thought, ‘I’ll just do it with these elements--Brazilian percussion, drums, bass, accordion, violin and keyboards.’ It had this warped Nina Rota kind of feel. It was a very cool band sound.”

But what came out in the end, after much reconfiguring and evolution, was a sparser, more enigmatic and diverse sound.

“I did a couple of songs with the band and started hearing some birds in there, some other kinds of thought or instruments,” she says. “I was missing other certain textures, so I piled a bunch of those on. And then eventually, at the end, I stripped things way back. There was a song, ‘Muddy River,’ with nine bass players on it. In the end, it was stripped down to almost nothing.” She laughs. “I guess this is my minimal period.”

Anderson has lived in SoHo long enough to pine for the old, pre-gentrification days of the mid-’70s, when her interdisciplinary aesthetic started taking shape. Twenty years later, Anderson is one of the world’s best-known and skilled multimedia mediators, one of whose juggling acts has been to thrive in an urban setting while avoiding the edgier aspects of urban life and art.

Living here, she says, “had a big impact on a lot of my preferences, a lot of my friends, a lot of what I think is interesting, which is in the avant-garde. There still is a bit of avant-garde left. People are doing interesting things. There are occasionally great shows in galleries.

“Also, I’m the kind of person who has to feel like I’m part of a neighborhood. I like that. SoHo has changed enormously since then. It’s a lot of shoe stores now, really. I’m not really fooling myself by thinking that the avant-garde is centered here, but there still is stuff going on. All of my longest friendships and collaborations are rooted here.”

A lthough her world of influence has expanded exponentially since she was an aspiring young artist 20 years ago, Anderson keeps in contact with people from the “neighborhood.” Two days after this interview, Anderson performed her own music behind a poem by John Ashbery, a longtime friend, in New York.

“I knew John from my days when I was an art critic, back in the days when poets were critics”--she breaks into a one-phrase song, “ ‘when poets were critics. . . .’

“That was really how they got their writing done--they’d go to see paintings and write vaguely about the paintings but mostly work on their style. It was illustrative writing.”

The ever-versatile Anderson has worked in film as well. Well-traveled between musical and visual dimensions and blessed with a strong instinct for the evocative atmospheres, she was a logical candidate to provide music for music-sensitive director Wim Wenders.

“His film ‘Wings of Desire’ was about to premiere in Cannes (in 1988), and he was mixing in a studio in town so he could run over to the festival,” she recalls. “I can relate to that so heavily. He calls me up and says, ‘Can you get me some angel fragments?’ Oddly enough, I knew exactly what he meant. I asked, ‘How many minutes?’ ‘Twenty.’ ‘Great.’

“So I put something together on a cassette, thinking that if he was interested, I’d record it properly. Well, he used the cassette. The thing was it sounded just fine. He’s really clever that way. He can take something that’s a little bit rough and use it really well. He really loves music. He made original music videos 20 years ago when all his films were based on a piece of music. He would take a song and shoot the thing. He knows music really well.”

As influences from cinema go, Rainer Werner Fassbinder also ranks highly in her book. Like Fassbinder, Anderson’s own work operates on more than one level. Raise the subject of the late German director, and Anderson becomes effusive.

“Here’s a guy who’s in this very heavy art scene in Munich, very tough, black leather, drugs. He could have been making hard-edged movies that were more like ‘Querelle,’ ” she says of his 1982 film, “but most of his films were about these giant middle-aged, middle-class German people who were very inarticulate. They were like pieces of upholstered furniture moving around. He had such empathy for these people. It was incredible.”

Oddly enough, Anderson compares Fassbinder’s character studies to early Bob Dylan songs.

“For the first time, instead of pop songs saying, ‘Hey ho, look at me, look at my car,’ he was writing about losers who didn’t have it together. It was like a shock.

“And it was so personal. In a way, unless it’s Billie Holiday singing, the blues almost has this generic quality--like we’ve all got the blues. Dylan has so many quirky personal details about why he feels bad. It’s not just that he has the blues. He tells you exactly why, and what he’s wearing and what he’s seeing. Those two guys--Dylan and Fassbinder--have a lot in common.”

Much as she has preserved a sense of aloofness through her work, shards from Anderson’s personal life continually crop up. One of the sound sources on the song “Tightrope” in “Bright Red” comes from Anderson’s private sonic archives, a recording of a Pentecostal preacher exhorting about the Second Coming.

“I recorded her in a church in the South about 10 years ago,” Anderson says, “and always wanted to do something with her. This was, unfortunately, where she landed, but I’ve got hours of it. She was the most charismatic, fabulous speaker. It was the kind of service where everyone was just jumping up and down and having a wild time, with a trap set on the altar. It was really a great service, just rollicking.

“My grandmother was a Southern Baptist, and I used to go with her (to church) to see the brothers and sisters sing. It was that kind of sweaty, wild service where people would lose it from time to time and roll in the aisles.

“The only time I’d seen anything like it was in Jerusalem in a Reform synagogue. People did the same thing standing up, shoulder to shoulder, making vocal noises and seeing things. I thought, ‘This is what it should be like,’ not just sitting calmly in those rows and listening to someone saying, ‘You were wrong, you were wrong, you should really try harder.’ You leave exhausted, thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve failed again.’ ”

In her work, Anderson has long drawn on religious references, through direct biblical quotations or by incorporating performance techniques borrowed from gospel traditions. Why the religious veneer?

“I don’t know why,” Anderson says, shrugging. “Maybe it’s the millennial thing. A lot of my childhood was about scare stories--these very weird Bible stories, with talking snakes and parting oceans. Regular people who were adults were telling me these things, mowing their lawns, going to potluck parties, and then they’d tell me these fantastic things as truth. That was my first taste of surrealism. Normal people telling me that clowns are going to rise up out of their cars and go somewhere. It opened up another world for me.”

Did this early exposure to religion provide seeds for her future art and her wild imagination?

“In a sense, because it also involved believing something,” she says. “I always thought that the reason I was attracted to art was that it almost gave meaning to people’s lives, especially in the early days of SoHo. People were very intense about what this meant. We were in another world, and it was an alternative to this one. It was more complex, and better, just basically a better world. It was a world full of wild aspirations.

“I made contact with other people. It wasn’t isolated. I really do think that the biggest problem”--she suddenly speaks brashly, like a huckster street-corner preacher--”the biggest problem here in this country”--then she returns to a more serious tone--”is loneliness. You’re sold so much stuff all the time about what’s supposed to mean something. Pop culture is a good example of that, or the news. You have this fake connection to the world, as if you know what’s going on. But, really, the things they’re talking about are gossip--which I love. But it’s not what gives meaning to my life. It’s just for fun. Any of the major questions that I have--like ‘Why am I here?’--nobody even attempts to grapple with.

“One of the reasons that I put a talking piece at the end of this record was because there are so many questions in the lyrics,” Anderson says, referring to “Same Time Tomorrow.” I noticed that on the lyric sheets and did a question-mark search with my computer. There are tons of them, all over the place. There are very few answers. It’s mostly because I’ve always hated people who come up with answers.”

She pauses, taking a drag on her cigarette, and continues:

“Asking a good question is real important. People will all come up with their own answers in their own lives to given questions. There are lots of different kinds of questions to ask, to help point to some of those things.”*