POP MUSIC REVIEW : Anderson Invites One and All to Her Electronic Campfire

This past year might be considered the one in which mainstream culture finally caught up with Laurie Anderson, whose work has long used computer technology as a sort of bridge between the cosmological and the mundane.

Now, Anderson can use the big screens behind her to display motion projections of Internet jargon and World Wide Web commands, set to a soundtrack of synthesized import, and the audience will quietly ooh and aah --not in awe, but in empathy.

If Anderson were just about future shock and spiritualized technolust, she’d be in big danger of being superseded right about . . . now. As it is, whatever chip-heaviness there is pretty much exists as a shared language with her audience, an atmospheric basis from which to get down to matters more primal. She has likened her multimedia extravaganzas to an electronic campfire--with a few newfangled ghost-in-the-machine stories to go with the spook tales.

Anderson’s first multimedia tour of the ‘90s is “The Nerve Bible,” which opened a three-night stand on Tuesday at the Wilshire Theatre. The title is her metaphor for the body, and the show is concerned with the corporeal, much as some of the stylistic touches evoke the ethereal.

One of her canniest spoken-word bits likens the eyes to a primitive motion picture camera setup: “The pans are a mess, and the dolly shots are awful, with your feet moving up and down. . . . If you saw the dailies, you’d fire the cameraman.” But in the editing room of memory, this inept cinematography improves radically, with smooth, clear, uninterrupted establishing shots: “Your mind has fixed it all up for you.” It’s much the same, she says, whenever we try to remember the past.

This show is a combination of one book (“Stories From the Nerve Bible”) and two albums (the song-based “Bright Red,” released last October, and the spoken-word “The Ugly One With the Jewels,” coming out next month)--although determining which of Anderson’s mass media are based on exactly which would require the chart-making skills of a professional chicken/egg theorist.

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Her combination of wry anecdotage and epic-scaled portent certainly does bridge the gap between, say, Spalding Gray and Queensryche. If you were a little bit appreciative and a little bit cynical, you might say her act is stand-up comedy for people who would never dream of going to the Comedy Store, accompanied by trippy film loops and sound effects for people who would never dream of indulging in a Pink Floyd concert.

The unfolding of the concert--the way it progresses from song to scripted digression to visual loop and back again--seems random for a while, almost to the point of reinforcing the notion that “performance art” is all too easy a catch-all for the structurally lazy. But Anderson is actually fairly savvy in the way the unpretentious chat of her first act ingratiatingly sets up the more abstract payoff of her second half.

One of the better later moments has Anderson interfacing with nothing less than a black hole or red sphere--played by herself, seen through a distorting camera on the end of her microphone.

“You rang? “ Anderson as the spacey otherness keeps repeating, sort of like the God of the book of Job, but afflicted with cosmic PMS as much as divine peevishness.

That she can successfully anthropomorphize outer space as well as inner is no small feat. “The Nerve Bible” is shown to have bigger feet--and legs, to use the show-biz parlance--still in that she can offer metaphors for the usual ‘90s thematic suspects, like AIDS and all things cyber, without seeming to tread too heavily over the obvious. Her cool-blooded nerviness hasn’t dated yet.

* Laurie Anderson appears tonight at the Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, 8 p.m. Sold out. (310) 480-3232.