I wasn’t exactly a pretentious 4-year-old; I wasn’t hip to
things like performance art, new age music, or critical theory. But I
didn’t know what “normal” was yet, either, and that’s probably why I
loved Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. It’s impossible to forget
my parents playing the album late at night, right before I went to bed,
how calm it made me—Anderson’s vocoded voice, her sampled “ahs”—there
was hardly anything there, but I remember my chest feeling very heavy,
the same way it does when I hear the album today. Whatever was going
on, Big Science made me fall in love with minimal music. And I
didn’t even know what minimal meant.

Originally released in 1982, Big Science was Laurie
Anderson’s great pop fluke. The album managed the feat of being so
bizarre it snuck into mainstream consciousness by weird brute force.
The “hit” single from the album, “O Superman,” managed to reach number
two in the UK music charts; stateside, it was considered more of a
gee-whiz techno novelty. Still, the success must have been surprising
for an artist like Anderson, who ran within New York’s uncompromising
avant-garde scene.

Listening to Big Science today, it’s clear the album is
both a product of its time and a total transcendence of that time.
Anderson’s experimentation with early sampling techniques on tracks
like “O Superman”—using her own voice to create polyrhythm out of vocal
ticks—had never been done before. Not to take away from any current
avant-garde accomplishments (Björk’s microphone bjurps?), it’s funny to
think Anderson had such radical experimentation beat by 20-odd
years.

Aside from the innovative production tricks, Big Science‘s
greatest asset is Anderson’s storytelling. Songs like “From the Air”
are filled with absurd spoken-word narratives—airplane pilots playing
Simon Says with the crew during a crash landing, chin-scratching asides
like “This is the time. And this is the record of the time” repeated as
the plane goes down. Moments like this are never ironic; Anderson gives
no winks to the audience. I remember thinking she sounded like a
space-age version of my mom—never judging, always calm. Of course, back
then, I didn’t understand anything about the avant-garde… but I
didn’t need to. Big Science was and is a lullaby steeped in
dream logic; the questions raised by the album never require answers or
need explanations.

Big Science was reissued July 17 by Nonesuch Records.