Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut album, Big Science, will return to vinyl
for the first time in thirty years with a new red vinyl edition. The vinyl
includes the remastered original album first released on CD for the 25th
anniversary of Big Science on Nonesuch in 2007.
In the early 1980s, Laurie Anderson was already respected as a conceptual artist
and composer, adept at employing gear both high-tech and homemade in her often
violin-based pieces, and she was a familiar figure in the cross-pollinating,
Lower Manhattan music-visual art-performance circles from which Philip Glass and
David Byrne also emerged. While working on her now-legendary seven-hour
performance art/theatre piece United States, Part I–IV, she cut the spare
“O Superman (For Massenet),” an electronic-age update of 19th century
French operatic composer Jules Massenet’s aria “O Souverain,” for the
tiny New York City indie label 110 Records. In the UK, DJ John Peel picked up a
copy of this very limited-edition 33⅓ RPM 7” and spun the eight-minute-plus
track on BBC Radio 1. The exposure resulted in an unlikely #2 hit, lots of
attention in the press, and a worldwide deal with Warner Bros. Records.
At the time of its original release, the NME wrote of Big Science,
“There’s a dream-like, subconscious quality about her songs which helps
them work at deeper, secret levels of the psyche.” With instrumentation
ranging from tape loops to found sounds to bag pipes, Big Science anticipated
the tech-savvy beats, anything-goes instrumentation and sample-based nature of
much contemporary electronic and dance music.