Laurie Anderson performs her newest work, Delusion, at UCLA's Royce Hall tonight, as part of her week-long tour of California. The Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed says of the piece: "To reveal too much would be to spoil amazement. A supreme dramatist, Anderson makes nearly every sentence a dramatic surprise, every visual image a bolt of wonderment." Nevertheless, he can say that Delusion is a "powerful, moving, incredibly rich work."
Laurie Anderson performs her newest work, Delusion, at Royce Hall in Los Angeles, tonight, as part of her week-long tour of California. The trip began with Tuesday night's performance of the piece at UC Santa Barbara's Campbell Hall and continues through the weekend with two performances of her solo retrospective work Transitory Life at Yoshi's in San Francisco, Saturday and Sunday nights.
Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed was at Tuesday's Campbell Hall performance. Though in her previous piece, Homeland, she eschewed multimedia components in favor of the words and music, Swed notes, here she reintegrates the visual, and "the beautiful, enveloping video helped keep us in touch with the outside world."
Swed sees Delusion as a more inward-looking piece than Homeland, which, in its stage form and on the recent Nonesuch album of the same name, touched on such topics as American foreign policy, economic collapse, and the erosion of personal freedom (though the album does, in fact, also incorporate some parts of Delusion).
"To reveal too much would be to spoil amazement," Swed explains in his review of the new piece. "A supreme dramatist, Anderson makes nearly every sentence a dramatic surprise, every visual image a bolt of wonderment."
He goes on to describe Delusion as a "powerful, moving, incredibly rich work," in which Anderson has "stripped bare her—and our—deepest, most troubling communal delusions."
Read the complete review at latimes.com.
For more information on upcoming performances, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.
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