Laurie Anderson at Green Music Center

If it weren’t so scary, Laurie Anderson’s latest foray in the news would work well as a performance art piece on stage.

In July, she was relaxing at a posh spa in New York, taking a dip in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, when she suddenly realized she was trapped and couldn’t get out. The edgy performance artist, most famous for her 1981 song “O Superman” and collaborations with late husband Lou Reed, panicked and called a friend. Fortunately, she’d brought her cellphone inside the chamber.

If this were on stage, as most of her life has played out in avant-garde vignettes of song, movement and multimedia, just imagine the claustrophobic terror. A virtual Houdini act in the making, it’s loaded with familiar Anderson trappings of technology, science and inward-looking, cyper-punk existentialism.

But, alas, it was very real. Her friend called 911 and when police showed up, Anderson was standing beside the chamber, finally able to pull back the zipper that had been stuck.

Glad to be alive and touring again, the 67-year-old, spiky-haired experimentalist brings her high-concept “Language of the Future” show to Green Music Center on Saturday, Oct. 25.

Here are the Top 5 things to know about Laurie Anderson right now:

1. Several decades before the oxygen chamber scare, she fell into a manhole - literally stepping out of a cab and into an open manhole in Manhattan. As she told the New York Times: “There were all these people peering into the manhole, laughing, and me saying, ‘Oh-oh, excuse me!’ And then: ‘Wow, how did you get down into this part of town? What route did you take?’”

2. Born in the Chicago suburbs, Anderson trained as a classical violinist and got her master’s in fine arts degree in sculpture from Columbia University. Her first performance art piece staged a symphony of car horns. As she began to invent instruments to fit her vision, she created a violin with a bow made from magnetic audio tape and a “talking stick” she can walk around with that takes sound and reassembles it. Over the years, she has collaborated with a long list of fellow pioneers that includes musicians Phillip Glass and Brian Eno, writers William Burroughs and Spalding Gray, and singer Bobby McFerrin.

3. A recurring character in her work is a solemn voice of authority that Anderson assumes in deep masculine tones. Her husband, Lou Reed, named her alter-ego “Fenway Bergamot.” Take a look at the cover of her 2010 album “Homeland” and you’ll see Anderson in mustache, thick brows and tie - the perfect iteration of Fenway in all his glory. He even has a Twitter account @fenwaybergamot.

4. In 2013, the farewell she wrote to her husband in Rolling Stone made fans all over the world cry: “I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world.”

5. Her latest work “Landfall” is a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, inspired by the night Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012. When it played in Brooklyn last month, a New York Times review ended with this line, “Like the Puerto Rican long-nosed bat or the slender-billed grackle, Ms. Anderson seemed to warn, humans as a species are doomed.”

Likewise, in the song “Language of the Future,” which Anderson will perform at the Green Music Center, she sings about a near-death air flight: “This is your captain ... We are going down. We are all going down, together.”

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014 or john@beckmediaproductions.com.