Laurie Anderson – Amelia

The spoken word artist Laurie Anderson disseminates phrases with the lulling quality of a siren as she recounts the travels and travails of Amelia Earhart, who set out from Oakland on 20 May 1937 in a bid to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe, intending to fly from California all the way back to California.

20 May was a fateful date for Earhart, who on that day in 1932 had departed from the old town of Harbour Grace in Newfoundland for her first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. Now she set out from Oakland to little fanfare in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra which she had dubbed her ‘flying laboratory’, only revealing to the world the nature of her plans upon arrival in Miami. This was Earhart’s second attempt to circumnavigate the globe, with the first having crashed to a halt a few months prior at Luke Field on Pearl Harbor owing to what is thought to have been a blown tire.

‘It was the sound of the motor I remember the most’ Anderson as Earhart confides, as on what is simply called Amelia the spoken word and pioneering electronic artist relays in diaristic form each phase of Earhart’s flight, which from Miami on 1 June takes us south, to the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan and then on to Brazil and the rivers of Latin America.

Accompanied by the Filharmonie Brno under the auspices of Dennis Russell Davies, the Trimbach Trio with string arrangements by the violinist Rob Moose, and her own Amelia Ensemble which features Martha Mooke on the viola, Marc Ribot on the guitar, Kenny Wollesen on percussion, Tony Sherr on bass and Ryan Kelly on the ukelele plus five starring vocals from Anohni, the music on the record is breathlessly airbound, made up of throbbing strings, keening drones and sudden choruses which seem to hover in the mid air before flitting off on some other course, in some other direction.

From the shimmering and synthesised choruses of ‘I See Something Shining’ to ‘Aloft’ where Anohni’s more wispy backing vocals prove redolent of his take on the Julee Cruise, David Lynch and Angelo Badalementi classic ‘Mysteries of Love’, we pass through Latin America over rivulets and rising smoke with Earhart checking the wind direction and watching the shadow of her plane on the water. The hardiness of Anderson’s lyrics which conjure in forthright manner the necessity of multi-tasking while in flight, with one eye on one’s surrounds and one eye always on the cockpit, still manages to give way to poetry of a more contemplative nature as on ‘Brazil’ where the narrator says ‘The sky has many avenues and streets, but you have to know how to find them’.

Crossing the equator, Amelia Earhart makes do in the torrid heat as the swooping arcs of Anohni’s voice juxtapose with Anderson’s more plainspoken word, capturing in tandem with the low end of all those strings everything from red skies and sunset shifts to the flashing contours of the Electra. After the slinky percussion of ‘Waves of Sand’, in arch tones Earhart outlines a curious letter which is addressed to Arab tribesman in case of disaster, then presses on to India as the plane makes landing at Dum Dum Airport in Kolkata, having passed over hazy mountains and the many mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. ‘Boats below are fishing for pearls’ Anderson as Earhart explains, ‘Shipped the parachutes home today, shouldn’t need them anymore. No we shouldn’t need them, not over the open ocean where there’s no place to land’, a phrase which repeats and begins to ascend as the propellers roar, wafting until it circles the aether.

At the mid-point of Amelia the artist and composer gives way to Earhart herself, who in a recording extols the ‘modern world of science’ and its many applications for the lives of women. Kenny Wollesen who has performed with everyone from Tom Waits and the Basque singer Ruper Ordorika to John Zorn, Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, carrying a penchant for klezmer and sea shanties in addition to avant-garde jazz, has hitherto managed to keep each destination in frame, his percussive rhythms sympathetic to local colour, but from the dark strings, spare plunks and childhood reminiscences of ‘Flying at Night’ we seem to become increasingly untethered.

‘The jungle swallows everything’ begins ‘The Word for Woman Here’, which imagines a whole town full of Marys as Earhart audibly wilts before giving in to the dubious conquest and lusty idealism of the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘Mandalay’, played here in the style of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground at their most chintzy. It’s the last moment of almost delirious levity before ‘Broken Chronometers’ delivers a blunt message of faulty equipment and ‘personal unfitness’, with the outlook for a timely return to California appearing ever more bleak.

‘Parachutes gone, visibility none’ Anohni laments at the outset of ‘The Wrong Way’ over some wailing background static. But our dogged leader puts a brave face on things as she notes that ‘the Electra is ready to take off on her longest flight’. The winds swirl out of order and somewhere across the Pacific, location unknown, ‘Fred’ passes out in the back of the plane, a reference to Earhart’s navigator Fred Noonan.

So we have reached a critical juncture, which prompts questions of identity and a collision of future and past as Anderson in the guise of Earhart recalls ‘smiling for the photographers’ who took to calling her by the monicker ‘Lady Lindy’, reflecting ‘I don’t even have my own name’. She dwells then upon the death of her father, summoning up ‘Ariel’s Song’ and the beginning of the famous second stanza ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’ from Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest before segueing into an anachronistic quotation of Allen Ginsberg singing ‘America, why are your libraries full of tears?’

Across the brisk course of Amelia there is always a bristling sense of foreboding. Its moments of contemplation and fancy are never passive, but instead manifestations of the Electra and its course through the skies, with the plane and its mechanics inseparable from the inner workings of Earhart’s mind and the slender grasp of her fingers. In this sense the Electra as well as the music of Amelia appears to have been spinning out of control right from the very outset.

At the end of ‘Fly Into the Sun’ there is a lurching sound, the gossamer strings of the ensemble snap and there is a palpable loss of pressure. Amid brief radio chatter and the hapless whirring of the propellers Earhart delivers her last message, saying ‘This is Amelia Earhart. KHAQQ’ her aircraft call letters. On the song ‘Howland Island’, named after the place where she never arrived, Anderson steps out of Earhart’s body and reverts to the role of third-person narrator as she depicts the pilot’s last recorded moments, saying that ‘Earhart estimated her chances of finding the island at about fifty-fifty’ and:

As she flew towards the island, she was broadcasting but on the wrong frequency. The closer she got, the fainter her voice became. To make a sharper signal, she began a series of loud whistles. But the mid-Pacific was full of high-frequency radio code and her signals were lost.

‘Radio’ featuring for the last time Anohni is an almost ecstatic battle sequence, with Anderson relaying the crossed wires of the Electra and the cutter Itasca which had been sent by the United States Coast Guard to provide support for the flight, while Anohni much like a Greek chorus echoes the phrases ‘Do not see you’ and ‘Cannot hear you’ stretching each last syllable until finally both voices peter out.

An electroacoustic mash of whistles and other high pitches, perhaps as the plane loses thrust, plus cymbal crashes and expressively bowed strings gives way on ‘Lucky Dime’ to pure wash as Anderson reinhabits Earhart, who says ‘Shining. My plane is shining like a lucky dime. My shadow on the water’. Amid the sloshing of waves and the odd gurgling sound Earhart has made a round trip of sorts, as Amelia bobs and drifts in the same way that it began, with Anderson as though divulging a secret as she repeats ‘It was the sound of the motor I remember the most’.