AUDIAanderson5 - Jerome Joy website

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!!1977 — Tape Bow Violin ---- \|t [../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow5.jpg]\|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t ''— — I had been on an Indian reservation, at a place in Canada. There was a place called Corner Restaurant, and there were no corners on the reservation and no streets, you know. But it’s one of those adapted sort of things, and in the restaurant there was a jukebox and in the jukebox there was only one record which was one that was popular at the time, George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby.” The Cree kids knew the song completely but with the weirdest kind of phrasing. They just learned it right off the record. I got real interested in that kind of tension between parodying something and swinging with it, so I made a film about that actually, about that jukebox, which is an animated crossword puzzle of various ways of spelling the lyrics to that song and the way they would leak into other meanings, like “Rock you, rock you”… so that the sound itself became very non-specific and it could be plugged into any number of meanings.{br} The soundtrack for that was using this violin voice thing so that is was a kind of parallel situation of enunciated things with the tone coming from somewhere else. That particular way of using sound is a lot like the things I’ve been working with recently, the tape-bow violin, which is an instrument that has an audio head mounted on the body of the violin.''\| \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t ''{br}''Question : One audio head ?''{br}— — One audio head, with stereo and running into a little preamp. Instead of horsehair on the bow, there is audio tape so that the dynamics of bowing then are really emphasized and it’s really a back and forth process.{br} I would make a lot of tapes in strips and then listen to them backward, you know, back and forth, and the first time that I was working with “wha” sounds, like “who are you ? Who is there ?”… and I was playing them backward and I started hearing all sorts of really interesting verse-reverse things.{br} I heard very plainly on one of the tapes “Lao Tse” which was the backward sound version of “who is there ?” It goes one way and then “Lao Tse” for some reason goes the other. It works very well bilingually because of the inflection. “Who are you ?” is “Juanita” backward. Well, especially languages that have a lilt at the end you know, “Juanita,” or “Lao Tse,” you know, anything that kind of comes up at the end. I mean, it doesn’t work anything like palindromes that are written backward situations. So I was thrilled to hear “Lao Tse” because I’d just been reading about a conversation that he had been having with another philosopher about whether it’s better to see or to hear, a real esoteric and totally un-resolvable conversation which he finally ended by saying, “Well, seeing your face is not as good as hearing your name.” So when I heard that name coming through, it was very exciting. {br}When I do a performance somewhere else, I would record, say, a lot of German phrases, going this way and then it would be English coming back the other way. {br}^[...^] Those ^[...^] performances ^[(such as those with the ''Tape Bow Violin'')^] actually were pretty much based on things that had happened to me in a sort of distant past.'' — {small}(Laurie Anderson, [Interview by Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, 1977\|http://www.fnewsmagazine.com/2006-apr/interview_1.html], published Apr. 2006, Fnews, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago){/small}\| {br}{br} [../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow1.jpg] [../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow3.jpg]{br}{br} [../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow2_600.jpg\|../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow2_1000.jpg] [../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow4_440.jpg\|../files/articles/anderson/1977_tapebow4.jpg] {br}{br} {br}{br}
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