Seven years ago this month Laurie Anderson stepped onto the stage at New York’s Town Hall and sang to a city still much in shock.

It was eight days after the terrorist attacks, after the two World Trade Center towers collapsed, and Anderson met the awkward challenge by blending new work with old.

With songs of loneliness, angels and dystopia, Anderson’s sound must have seemed perfect at the time. At least it does in retrospect, in the concert recording released a few months later. “Here come the planes,” she intoned, eerily. That was from her mesmerizing classic, “O Superman,” which she’d written 20 years earlier, at the time of another geopolitical storm.

Now another anniversary is upon us this week, and Anderson has been touring a concert that’s much in tune with the post-9/11 zeitgeist.

It’s called “Homeland,” and she’ll perform it Sept. 12 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The concert marks the beginning of a fall tour to U.S. concert halls. She launched “Homeland” in Europe last year and the U.S. last spring, and she has just returned from a string of gigs in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

With a title that emits multiple meanings in these times, “Homeland” gives Anderson a chance to explore the world as it has evolved since that fateful day in 2001.

“Many years later we find ourselves living, in many ways, in a very different place,” Anderson said recently by phone from Santiago, Chile. “And a lot of people have felt the same way I have - disoriented about a lot of things. In particular having to do with the war.

“So ‘Homeland’ was about looking at this contemporary culture through two filters - the filters of love and war. I’m just trying to come at it from a bunch of different angles without being didactic. Nobody needs more didactic.”

Instead, Anderson explores what might have been lost in the last eight years. She sings of political “experts,” “underwear gods” and Oprah (“let’s say you’re invited on Oprah and you don’t have a problem ...”). In Anderson’s vision of the “American night” everything seems distorted.

Tuning into the music of Laurie Anderson is to be swallowed by sonic clouds and dreamscapes. Pulsating carpets of tender, techno sounds often carry Anderson’s voice - at times a whisper, at times a wavery song - through stories of modern life. Her style sometimes evokes the likes of Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, but it’s always unmistakably her own.

Sometimes head-on, sometimes surreal, Anderson has worked her terrain as performance artist/multi-media bard for more than three decades. Her resume includes a series of stunning recordings, beginning in the early 1980s with “Big Science” and “United States I-IV,” but also projects for choreographers, the Olympics (Athens, 2004), festivals around the world and even NASA.

She developed “Homeland” in recent years while touring the globe.

“I did a lot of improvising with a lot of different groups,” she said. “One was with Mongolian throat singers, others were with a jazz band, others were with electro-pop people. So I’d play a bunch of different things and keep one or two.”

Improvisation was not her usual M.O., she said, but she had fun doing it and creating a series of songs and sounds that add up to another entry in her ongoing explorations of American life, love, identity, technology, politics and power.

How convenient that the current leg of the tour is occurring during a presidential election season.

“I’m trying to describe things,” she said. “But I’m also very fascinated by the element of stories. That’s kind of my medium. And during elections, elections are all about stories. We want to know whether the story is plausible or not, whether candidates are spinning stories about themselves or about the past or a possible future.

“You know, McCain, telling this story of 100 years of war in Iraq? Why is he telling that story? And what is it based on?”

According to many accounts, “Homeland” relies much less on multimedia effects than earlier Anderson productions. All the better to keep the focus on words and music.

As usual, she plays violin, keyboards and other electronic instruments, and is accompanied by a small and occasionally changing group of musicians.

Occasionally that includes rock icon Lou Reed, her longtime companion-recently-turned-husband. Reed played guitar on a couple of the pieces during the South American tour, including “The Lost Art of Conversation,” Anderson’s meditation on illusion and love (“I pretend that I’m happy, you pretend that you’re there”).

Reed is not scheduled to show up in Lawrence.

“Probably not,” she said. “But you never know. There’s that last-minute thing.”