Laurie Anderson's new radio show, Party in the Bardo: Conversations with Laurie Anderson, premiered on WESU Middletown 88.1FM at 4am ET this morning, June 5, 2020—her birthday—followed by an encore broadcast at 4pm ET. It is also available to stream via WESU for two weeks following the initial broadcast; you can listen again here. The episodes begins this way:

"It's June 5, 2020, and we are in a national emergency, with no boundaries, an emergency that keeps shifting from day to day, as marches and protests demanding racial equality and justice for George Floyd happen all over the country and all over the world," Anderson says in her introduction to the debut episode. "The pandemic has kept many people isolated for weeks or months with no definite end in sight. And what's amazing is that what finally brings people flooding out into the streets is not anger or greed or fear. It is a tremendous surge of empathy. It is a passionate and shared and long overdue outrage, a huge and global cry for justice. And this is being met by the President of the United States not with gratitude for the sense of fairness in the American people. No, this movement of empathy and fairness and solidarity is being met with tanks and threats. It's almost as if the surge of goodness itself cannot be tolerated, because it cannot be understood.

"Of course, many things happen around this moment that cloud the picture: The movement is leaderless; many marchers have no experience with provocateurs, or self-defense, or what to do if attacked or arrested. The movement has many sides. Some people are forced out of isolation by hunger; many are out of work, suddenly homeless. There's looting and aggression by people who want to create chaos and fear. We are polarized. And here we are in the Bardo, in the pause between two realities, in a time when nobody knows what's next."

In that first episode, Laurie Anderson speaks with writer Jonathan Cott, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the recent author of Listening: Interviews 1970-1989, about time and hesitation. Cott and Anderson share and discuss music by Chopin, Bach, Monk, Messiaen, and more, including "Song for Bob," which Anderson wrote for Nonesuch President Bob Hurwitz on his transition to Chairman Emeritus and which composer/pianist Timo Andres performs on the new Nonesuch album I Still Play. The first episode is dedicated to their friend and music producer Hal Willner, who passed away from COVID-19 in New York City in April.

Party in the Bardo: Conversations with Laurie Anderson features Anderson in conversation with close friends and colleagues as the world grapples with the global pandemic.

“Since the early ‘80s, I’ve dreamed of ... having a radio show in the middle of the night” said Anderson. “When time slows down, where the lines between sleeping and waking, between dreams and reality, are getting blurred, and when people’s defenses drop away, and logic just seems to be very limiting.”

For more information and to find upcoming episodes as they become available, visit wesleyan.edu.