Laurie Anderson Is Playing A Concert For Dogs In New York Tonight
Laurie Anderson is a longtime fixture in the experimental-music world and Lou Reed’s widow. And she’s also a dog person. As Pitchfork points out, Anderson is playing a concert in New York’s Times Square tonight, and it’s specifically tailored to dog listeners. Anderson will play music at a low frequency, specifically geared toward dog ears, and humans won’t be able to hear it. (If you show up early enough, there will be 350 pairs of wireless headphones that’ll let you hear it.) Anderson played a similar show in Sydney in 2010, and she tells The New York Times that, as she was near the end of the show, the dogs in attendance began to bark: “It was a beautiful sound. They barked for five minutes. That was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
The concert is part of Midnight Moments, the promotional initiative that regularly turns Times Square billboards into art galleries. In December 2014, Antony & The Johnson’s “You Are My Sister” video played on Times Square billboards every night, and artists like Björk and Yoko Ono have taken part in it. (Ono tells The Times that the concert-for-dogs idea is something that “only Laurie can get away with.”)
The concert ties in with Heart Of A Dog, the new 75-minute documentary that Anderson made. The movie, which has been shortlisted for an Oscar, is “a poetic visual essay about, among other things, the journey from life to the afterlife,” according to The Times. A three-minute cut of it will appear on those Times Square billboards.
The show starts at 11:30PM tonight. Dogs and their owners can sit on the steps of Duffy Square while Anderson performs. If your dog is tough enough to walk through Times Square at night without bugging the fuck out, then Anderson’s challenging music should be nothing too difficult.