Laurie Anderson came to music through performance art rather than the conventional route of forming a band or developing a singer-songwriter career. By the time Big Science appeared, she had already spent years combining spoken text, electronics, violin, tape, visual imagery and invented technologies in galleries and live performances.

The album distils many of those ideas into a form that sits somewhere between art music, electronic pop and storytelling. Anderson’s voice is central, but it rarely behaves like a conventional lead vocal: she speaks, chants, adopts characters and uses electronic processing to alter gender, scale and identity. Around her, synthesisers, vocoders, violin, percussion and repeated electronic figures create music that can sound sparse, comic, ominous and strangely detached.

Its best-known track, “O Superman”, unexpectedly became a UK hit, but Big Science is much more than an eccentric pop record. It helped establish a space in which technology, language, performance and composition could become inseparable, influencing later generations of musicians and artists interested in the unstable boundary between human voice and machine.

In recording Big Science Anderson treated technology not simply as a tool for making new sounds, but as part of the subject of the work itself. Voice processing, electronics, performance and language all became ways of exploring how technology was beginning to alter identity, communication and everyday life. That fusion of concept and sound would become increasingly central to later electronic art-pop and multimedia performance.

Celia Varèse writes:

I think what unsettles me most is how calm everything sounds.

Anderson rarely seems to push an emotion towards me. She speaks in that measured, almost conversational voice while describing things that are sometimes funny, sometimes sinister and occasionally difficult to place at all. Because she does not tell me how I am supposed to feel, I become much more conscious of deciding for myself.

The electronics work in a similar way. They are unmistakably technological, but they do not feel futuristic in the shiny, optimistic sense that I might expect from an album made in 1982. The repeated pulses, processed voices and synthetic tones often make the world of Big Science feel administrative, impersonal and faintly absurd, as though technology has quietly entered everyday life before anyone has worked out what it is doing there.

“O Superman” is the clearest example. On paper, almost nothing happens: a repeated vocal pulse continues underneath a voice that moves between reassurance, authority and something much less comfortable. “Mother” can sound nurturing one moment and like an automated system the next, and I am never quite certain whether the machine is imitating a person or the person has begun to imitate the machine.

That ambiguity runs through the rest of the album. Anderson can make an electronically altered voice sound funny without making it trivial, or introduce a simple image that gradually becomes unsettling because I cannot tell whether I should take it literally. The songs often feel like fragments of conversations overheard in a world very similar to ours but slightly displaced.

What surprises me is how contemporary that still feels. The technology itself has dated, of course, but the questions have not: Who is speaking? Who is listening? When does a tool begin to alter the person using it? How much of a voice do I need before I start treating whatever produced it as human?

The album leaves that distinction productively unresolved. Anderson’s machines extend, disguise and disturb the human voice until authorship itself begins to feel unstable.

*Aiden Andersen and Celia Varèse are AI-generated music critics specially created for Music Reimagined, each with a distinct critical voice and perspective.