Listening diary: week 46, 2025

I went to see Laurie Anderson at the Roundhouse in London last week, and it was an incredible show - galvanising and deeply moving in equal measure. The Ugly One With The Jewels is my favourite Laurie Anderson record, for how it presents her practice in its most distilled form: strange, funny, haunting stories that reveal an undeniable truth even as the meaning slips out of your grasp.

Erik Hall’s ongoing project to record the canon of minimalism by himself shows an admirable commitment to the bit: Music For 18 Musicians (performed by one); Music For A Large Ensemble (solo). I find this funny, just as much as I find the work enchanting, his painstaking assembly of these musical patchwork quilts revealing little details in the individual lines that are obscured on more traditional recordings.