This piece in particular rests on a razor’s edge, seemingly content on lying back and letting the world press down until it is cleaved in two. She runs through this vocal catalog, as it were, as a way of rearticulating the nature of her supposed loss and the comportment of its breathing remnants. Her register strays into animal territory, as if intent on communicating to any and all creatures that might be listening. She cries as she sings, intoning and droning. In doing so, she looses the strictures of emotional conduct, shedding the outer walls of her physical makeup. Her utter abandon allows her access to divine control through the very lack of her desire to control. Peeking out from the deepest recesses of articulation, Monk sings as if in mourning. It is a keen in reverse that scrapes the interiors of our lungs. This is the most emotional composition on the album and makes me stop what I’m doing every time it comes on. It is the voice of a larger social body gone awry rather than that of a single individual corrupted by its oppressive infrastructure. This is not the voice of the insane, despite what its many disjunctions might have us believe. I still have my gold ring…beautiful, I love it, I love it! I still have my telephone…hello, hellooo, hellooooo?Īnd between these seemingly innocuous interjections, she riddles our attention with rhythmic laughter against the sound of breaking glass, the detritus of the living. Over this conformist backdrop, she proclaims: She casts her lot into the chasm at her feet as one other voice takes up the call, floating like a severed head in the ether, its mouth agape to expel the song of its birth and its death.Ī thread of piano and mouth organ supports a series of vocal beads in which we get our first and only discernible words. Monk converses with her self, as if the piano were not another voice but a landscape in which the voice has found purchase. Words dissolve, wetted by the trickling of monosyllables, grunts, and cries. The emergence of a rain stick adds an air of ceremony, where the piano becomes our circle and Monk the medium who channels voices of the dead in a semblance of life. Monk carries full weight in her confident ululations. This little journey springs to life with a rollicking piano laced with ritualistic drumbeats. This is a lullaby of trees, if not for trees a dream of darkness between branches and the decay of leaves falling past the city’s edge a place where the wind can still be felt… Sustained tones hover in the background just out of reach as her voice ebbs and flows along a wordless coast. Over a sparse layer of four-note arpeggios, Monk sings and squeals, tracing her swan song in the dust. Monk’s music is all about the voice: it extends from the voice, begins and ends in the throat, reveling in its elasticity, its pliancy, its fragility. Listening to it anew, I prefer to think of it as music that comes from a place so deep within, so familiar, that we tremble to hear it blatantly exposed. When I first heard Dolmen Music as a teenager, I thought of it as folk music from lands that had yet to be discovered (admittedly, this interpretation was shaped by an oft-cited description to the same effect). Like much of Meredith Monk’s work, the atmospheres on this album are as foreign as they are familiar and comprise a vivid testament to the staying power of her compositional talents. Produced by Manfred Eicher and Collin Walcott Recorded March 1980 and January 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
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