Maybe there’s a bit of Amelia Earhart in Grammy Award-winning composer Laurie Anderson.
Earhart set herself an ambitious goal – to be the first woman to fly around the world. An experienced pilot, she and her navigator Fred Noonan left Miami on 1 June 1937 for an east-west route that would have totalled 29,000 miles and lasted just over a month. Her plane was a specially-modified Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft, enhanced to increase fuel capacity and equipped with innovative radio equipment. Earhart completed 22,000 of those miles before her plane crashed near Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. Her and Noonan’s bodies and their Electra were never found, and the cause of the crash has never been determined.
Like Earhart Anderson is also no stranger to ambitious goals. Since emerging with her first multimedia performance in 1969, Anderson has consistently shown herself to be a resolutely iconoclastic composer, instrument designer and artist. She scored an unlikely pop hit with 1981’s ‘O Superman’ and more or less refused to conform to any particular expected role ever since. The large-scale project is Anderson’s natural environment, her voice(s), meticulous approach to sound design and ceaseless imagination her chosen means of expression.
‘Amelia’ finds Anderson taking on the role of Earhart, imagining her thoughts and contemplations as she sat in the cockpit of the Electra. A mix of observations of the ground and lands passing below, diaristic recollections from her past and checklists of activities relating to controlling the plane, this is far from sort of tragic opera shifting from optimism to disaster. For the most part, Anderson’s voice has a quality of detachment, as if she is embodying the musings of someone lost deep in their thoughts, with only clouds for company. For sure, this was a journey filled with excitement, but long stretches of flight were also crushingly monotonous. Anderson’s delivery navigates a line between those two points.
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These musings are accompanied, for the most part, by an orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies and occasional emotive vocals from Anohni, one of Anderson’s friends and long-standing collaborators. Beneath the quietly dramatic strings exists a complex soundscape which illustrates just how ambitious and carefully crafted ‘Amelia’ truly is. Forty years in the making – a year longer than Earhart’s entire lifespan – the foundation of these pieces is a motor sound, finely wrought by Anderson from layers of drones, electronics and orchestral samples. It acts like a recurring motif in a soundtrack, Anderson deploying it across the majority of the 22 segments that ‘Amelia’ consists of, often creating jarring, industrially-heavy juxtapositions with the comparative smoothness of the orchestra. In her imagination, she suggests that Earhart only felt alive when she was able to hear the sound of the motor, hence its consistent presence here. An imagined musing by Earhart about the motor both opens and closes the suite.
‘Amelia’ has taken years to come to fruition – 25 to be precise – and has gone through several significant developmental changes along its journey. In contrast, Earhart’s plans for her journey formed over just three. Anderson’s relentless focus here is on the question of motivation – why did Earhart set herself this ambitious goal? It is, ultimately, as unknowable as the location of the downed Electra. In Anderson’s hands, however, we come closer to understanding what possesses people through history to reach for outsized achievements, through the accomplishment of one of her own. ‘Amelia’ is this a towering work of artistic endeavour and creative genius which comfortably ranks as one of Anderson’s most definitive statements yet.
9/10
Words: Mat Smith
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