Laurie Anderson: music for dogs and Obama

She's outraged by the president, inspired by Occupy – and loves to compose for canines. Queen of the New York avant garde Laurie Anderson explains what drives her
Laurie Anderson
Tender, angry, corny ... Laurie Anderson. Photograph: Annie Collinge for the Guardian

'You'd think there'd be a revolution in every single little town," Laurie Anderson says. "You can do what? You can arrest people for no reason? And put them away with no notification, and no trial? The best would be a military trial. Why did no one say a thing? Why didn't artists say anything?"

Anderson – performer, composer, artist and all-round superstar of New York's downtown avant garde – has spent decades probing the bizarre customs and rituals of American life. But what has her worked up on this ice-cold New York morning is a specific piece of legislation: the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Obama signed at the end of 2011. The act gave the president the power to order the military to detain anyone, American or otherwise, without trial, for life. "On the face of it, unconstitutional," Anderson argues. "That made me crazy. That's why I wrote Dirtday!"

Dirtday! is the third in a trilogy of solo performances and sees Anderson in a markedly engaged mode. (The title's exclamation mark is itself very unAndersonian. "I hate titles," she says.) Alone on stage with her keyboard and electric violin, she muses on the security state and America's crazy healthcare system, and narrates a trip she took to a tent city in New Jersey, where citizens who have lost their jobs live off the grid. Mixed into that are musings on Darwin and the Catholic church, a tender reflection on the death of her dog Lolabelle, and more than a few corny jokes, delivered with her hypnotic, almost disbelieving pitch. She races through sentences, then holds the last sound in the air, as if she's examining it: "What-if-they-find-out-there-are-lots-of-planets-just-like-ourssssssss?" Or she switches on a harmoniser, which distorts her voice into a creepy basso profundo: "Another d-a-a-a-y. Another dollar-r-r-r-r."

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"I started Dirtday! and it was really just pure music," says Anderson. "And it always starts this way. I'm not very good at predicting what these things are going to become. But [the NDAA] became something I wanted to write about, and this music piece became a word piece, and I realised 'Oh, that's the third part of this three-part thing.'"

The first two were Happiness, a 2002 performance that grew out of a job she took at a McDonald's in New York's Chinatown; and The End of the Moon, inspired by a residency at Nasa. "The other two were also shaggy-dog stories, which move from here to there. I realised that my goal here really is to represent – it sounds super-pompous – how we think and how we associate. To use stories rather than poems, spoken things and not experimental writing: that puts them in a different context, and gives them a different focus and a different sort of slant."

Dirtday! will be performed as part of the Adelaide festival next month. It's not Anderson's first trip to Australia. In 2007, Australian audiences saw Homeland, a rumination on war and national identity, which she later released as an album. And in 2010 she and Lou Reed, her husband, co-curated the Vivid festival in Sydney, inviting everyone from the Blind Boys of Alabama to a Japanese grindcore band.

Anderson herself played an unusual gig during that Sydney festival: a concert for dogs. "It was probably the most fun I have ever had doing music. We thought a couple hundred dogs would show up. Thousands. Overflowing the area. They were all over the steps of the Sydney Opera House. You looked out and it was just a sea of dogs: a lot of rocker dogs, but also some droolers in the front row. And there was not one dog fight!

"It started out with an invocation for whales, 'cause the whales are right there in the harbour. And why do animals sing? For whales, it's to find each other in the ocean. And for dogs as well: it's a kind of geolocation system." She punctuates this with an impressive variety of barking sounds: a little spaniel yip, a St Bernard growl.

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It's hard to imagine anyone else playing whale-summoning tunes to an overflow canine audience at Bennelong Point. Born in the American midwest in 1947, Anderson came to New York in the late 1960s and never left, joining a downtown set that included innovative composers such as Philip Glass and John Zorn. Her song O Superman, with its ethereal vocals and pulsing ah-ah-ah-ah bassline, brought her unexpected fame and a recording contract with Warner Brothers, though success on a huge scale was never the goal. "I think that mass culture is idiotic. I always have. Even things that are the sort of trendy new whatevers, it's always about money and sex and nothing else."

Instead, Anderson has remained firmly in the experimental camp, spending years working on her wildly ambitious United States I-IV, an eight-hour multimedia performance which featured songs about democracy, nuclear weapons and the post office, and which culminated in a projection of the American flag tumbling in a clothes dryer. Many classic works from that period of the New York avant garde are now being rediscovered and revived (notably Glass's Einstein on the Beach, which tours to Melbourne in August), and Anderson was recently approached about resurrecting it. She refused, on the grounds that "it would be the dreariest thing just to remake them. I want to make new things."

Instead she is at work on a United States V, which will revisit many of the themes of the first four segments, none of which have really gone away: "What happens to information when it's digitised? Guns. Prisons. It's not a happy picture particularly, but I'm not a happy person anyway. I tend to look at the dark side of things. I'm a gloomy Swede." (She means temperamentally: her parents are from the midwest, too.)

If there's a single thread running through Anderson's diverse output, it's an engagement with new technologies and a willingness to put the usually hidden parts of music and performance – mixing boards, rigs, filters – out in the open. Her newest bit of kit is an iPad app for live performance that has taken nearly a year to develop; it makes her eyes light up to talk about it. At the press of a button, she can distort the register of her violin, or access entire ranges of keyboard sounds that once required multiple instruments. "It's so cool! I'm really geeking out on it. I hate hauling things, and what used to take six trucks now fits in one small case."

Tech plays a large part in Anderson's other imminent Australian gig, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet that will be performed in Perth and Adelaide. Landfall: Scenes from My New Novel, which premiered this month outside Washington, DC, is their first collaboration. "They said at the beginning, 'We want to tell stories.' I said, 'Why don't I make something so that you can tell them with your instruments?'" The result is a piece of triggering software that projects text on to the stage as the quartet plays. Words pop up in response to the notes, while Anderson recites from a text independent from the software.

It sounds utterly chaotic, but with the help of the music, Anderson claims, "you suddenly realise you can read 10 times faster than you ever thought you could. The clumsiness of how text usually relates to music, through supertitles, is horrible. We can absorb written stuff in different ways, and in polyphonic ways. Here you have to choose between what's being said and what's being written. You catch yourself trying to make these matches, and that's what the piece is about."

Now 65, her trademark spiky hair a bit greyer, Anderson is making work with a more aggressive character than in the early days, when the tone of her performances tended towards a curious, almost forensic detachment. Homeland, co-produced by Reed, featured angry guitar lines and deeply cynical lyrics about Iraq, torture and climate change – and Dirtday!, while less strident, follows in a similar vein. She credits the Occupy Wall Street protests with giving her work a new impetus. At the height of Occupy, Glass's opera Satyagraha (which uses the story of Gandhi's radicalisation in South Africa as a model for collective struggle) was being performed at the Metropolitan Opera; Anderson and Reed joined Glass and other demonstrators outside the building, chanting slogans and helping young occupiers over the police barricades. "When your government breaks, what do you do? At what point do you stand up? It was pretty hair-raising, because you realise that this is not the first government that's broken. And what is your responsibility? Do you have one?"

But she draws a clear distinction between her activism and her art. Dirtday! isn't a polemic. Politics are just one element in a dreamy, flowing landscape with no clear boundaries. "I do speeches as well, but I prefer to put it in a work of art. Because I have a certain horror of telling people what to do. I mean, I don't know what to do, I really don't, so I would have a really hard time telling other people. And it doesn't work very well. But if you can describe it really well, then people can make up their own minds. That's what I'm looking to do. I'm not trying to change the world – I'm trying to describe it as well as I can."

Laurie Anderson performs Landfall at the Barbican, London, in June. Click here for details. She also performs at the Adelaide festival, 1-3 March. The Guardian is the festival's 2013 partner, supported by Emirates.