Landfall Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet

• 1 CNN Predicts a Monster Storm 03:19
• 2 Wind Whistles Through the Dark City 01:58
• 3 The Water Rises 02:43
• 4 Our Street Is a Black River 01:20
• 5 Galaxies 01:06
• 6 Darkness Falls 01:55
• 7 Dreams 04:01
• 8 Dreams Translated 00:50
• 9 The Dark Side 01:10
• 10 Built You a Mountain 02:16
• 11 The Electricity Goes out and We Move to a Hotel 03:03
• 12 We Learn to Speak yet Another Language 03:00
• 13 Dawn of the World 02:22
• 14 The Wind Lifted the Boats and Left Them on the Highway 02:40
• 15 It Twisted the Street Signs 01:13
• 16 Then It Receded 00:52
• 17 The Nineteen Stars of Heaven 02:43
• 18 Nothing Left but Their Names 09:38
• 19 All the Extinct Animals 02:50
• 20 Galaxies II 00:53
• 21 Never What You Think It Will Be 01:11
• 22 Thunder Continues in the Aftermath 01:54
• 23 We Blame Each Other for Losing the Way 00:41
• 24 Another Long Evening 01:56
• 25 Riding Bicycles Through the Muddy Streets 02:36
• 26 Helicopters Hang Over Downtown 02:15
• 27 We Head Out 01:49
• 28 Everything Is Floating 01:59
• 29 Gongs and Bells Sing 02:32
• 30 Old Motors and Helicopters 02:49
• Total Runtime 01:09:34

Info for Landfall

Out on Nonesuch Records, new album from Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet’s Landfall, a work inspired by Anderson’s experience of Hurricane Sandy, and the first collaboration between the iconic storyteller/musician and the groundbreaking string quartet, who perform together on the recording. Landfall juxtaposes lush electronics and strings with Anderson’s powerful descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species to Dutch karaoke bars.

Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson have performed Landfall at commissioning presenters Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Adelaide Festival, Barbican Centre, Montclair State University, Perth International Arts Festival, Stanford Live, and the University of Texas at Austin, among other venues. The New York Times said the piece’s presentation at Brooklyn Academy of Music ‘set the auditorium awash in elegiac string sounds and postmillennial gloom. Performed by the composer and the tirelessly innovative Kronos Quartet, the work, written in New York during that epic storm, often resembled the flotsam bobbing on the receding floodwaters, with poignant snippets and small treasures.’

“These are stories with tempos,” Anderson says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the complex relationship of words and music whether in song lyrics, supertitles or voice over. In Landfall, instruments initiate language through our new text software, erst. The blend of electronic and acoustic strings is the dominant sound of Landfall. Much of the music in this work is generated from the harmonies and delays of unique software designed for the solo viola and reinterpreted for the quartet. In addition, there were elements of the optigan, a keyboard that uses information stored on optical discs.”

Kronos Quartet founder, artistic director, and violinist David Harrington says, “Laurie Anderson is the master magician musician who has always inhabited those secret places where technology has personality, where ‘real time’ is questioned and where all the elements of performance meet and combine into music. Her process is to gather and continue to gather potentially useful aspects as she sculpts a shape. Her sense of play and fun and her continuous experimenting make her the ideal chemist (or is it alchemist?) in the laboratory of music.”

Laurie Anderson, voice, keyboards, treatments
Kronos Quartet:
David Harrington, violin
John Sherba, violin
Hank Dutt, viola
Sunny Yang, cello

Laurie Anderson
is one of America’s most renowned - and daring - creative pioneers. She is best known for her multimedia presentations and innovative use of technology. As writer, director, visual artist, and vocalist, she has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, and experimental music.

Her recording career, launched by O Superman in 1981, includes the soundtracks to her feature films Home of the Brave and Life on a String composed in 2001. Anderson’s live shows range from simple spoken word to elaborate multi-media stage performances such as Songs and Stories for Moby Dick in 1999. Anderson has published eight books and her visual work has been presented in established museums around the world.

In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance The End of the Moon. Film projects include a series of audio-visual installations and a high definition film, Hidden Inside Mountains, created for World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. In 2007, she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. In 2008 she completed a two-year worldwide tour of her performance piece, Homeland, which was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June 2010. Anderson’s solo performance Delusion debuted at the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad in February 2010 and toured internationally throughout 2011. A retrospective of her visual and installation work was exhibited in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 2010. In 2011, an exhibition of her visual work was shown at the Fabric Work-shop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Vito Schnabel presented the first exhibition of Anderson’s paintings in New York in 2012 and has continued to work with her since. Anderson’s Drum Dance from Home of the Brave was exhibited at Vito Schnabel Gallery in St. Moritz in 2016 as part of the exhibition A Selection of Works from the 1980s.

In 2017, MASS MoCA’s Building 6 opened, beginning a fifteen-year rotating exhibition of work from Anderson’s archive as well as a platform to present new works. As part of the 2017 opening, Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang premiered their first collaborative VR works Chalkroom and Aloft. Chalkroom has been featured in film festivals all over the world including The Venice Film Festival where it won the award for “Best VR Film” under its Italian title La Camera Insabbiata. Anderson continues to tour her evolving performance Language of the Future and has collaborated with Christian McBride and Philip Glass on several projects in 2017. Anderson continues to work with the activist group The Federation which she co-founded in 2017.

In February of 2018, Landfall, a collaboration between Anderson and Kronos Quartet was released through Nonesuch Records. Commissioned by Kronos Quartet in 2013, the work was inspired by the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy. This February, Rizzoli is releasing All The Things I Lost In The Flood, a book of images and a series of essays about pictures, language, and codes.

Booklet for Landfall