Moses Sumney: "O Superman" (Laurie Anderson Cover)
In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—Dave Tompkins’ fascinating history of how the vocoder transformed from WWII encrypting device to funky futuristic enabler—there is a chapter that opens with Laurie Anderson‘s “O Superman”, one of the most peculiar songs to ever dominate the Pazz & Jop critics poll and Top of the Pops. “The song takes place on an answering machine imagined,” Tompkins writes, “a disembodied voice addressing a room that was less empty than just withholding presence.” He wonders what Alan Turing, forefather of artificial intelligence, would have made of “these Laurie Andersons in a vocoder—arms, petrochemical, electronic and military—as if false security and comfort were indivisible.” The haunting remove of her synthesized vocal conjures “Daisy” as sung by HAL 9000 on the surface of planet Hoth, with the looming potential of a nuclear winter in Reagan’s early ’80s America.
It might be one of those songs that is too daunting to tackle. So what is so striking about Moses Sumney‘s rendition of “O Superman” (which appears on the recent Moogfest Vol. 1 EP) is how warm, humid, and human it all sounds. It was the only direction Sumney could take “O Superman”. The original voices a detached, mechanized future that seems too real now, even if the notion of an answering machine—much less an outgoing message that says “I’m not home right now”—feels quaint in light of our phones never being far from our bodies, regardless of where home is.
Sumney’s exhalations sound more like Roger Troutman of Zapp, but even run through the plastic tubing of the vocoder, Sumney’s staggering vocals emerge intact. Handclaps echo, his voice multiplies into a gospel choir that moans and lurches on loop. It all wobbles and melts into mewls and noise, but not before Sumney susses out the warm core of the original’s nuclear-armed embrace.
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