Meredith Monk
Songs From The Hill

THE REVIEW

Is it possible to belong to the avant-garde genre exclusively thanks to one's vocal cords? Indeed, we are talking about vocal cords, but Meredith Monk exudes uniqueness, rarity, and future from every single movement of her dizzying and monumental voice. She can command it to nestle sweetly at her feet like a puppy or weave a harsh and impenetrable Chinese wall. Monk began her singing career in the Big Apple during the '60s. After various and grueling vocal training, her merits were recognized, reaching their acme in avant-garde collaborations, prominently featuring the name of the fundamental minimalist guru, John Cage.
Following her personal development with some of the most vibrant pillars of the American "futurist" scene, she decided to record works of vital importance in sound research under her own name. The New Yorker has a timbral polymorphism worthy of the greatest theatrical exponents of the '900, and her ideas reverberate in the experimental environment like swarms of cacophonous bats housed in a cave. Songs From The Hill is entirely composed on a barren hill in New Mexico. Listening to it brings to mind Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times," when the most expressive mustache of black and white performs, in a tavern turned singer, phrases that belong to no known language, but are actually part of the universal human "Language": the one shaped on atypical pauses, primitive flows, and rediscovered tonalities. If average singers have a vocal script to rely on, Monk smears it, grates it, renders it mush, and erects an atypical, more human one on those ashes.

Songs From The Hill consists of 10 chapters in which the protagonist masterfully takes on just as many vocal metamorphoses. The monotone rasp of "Insect", the new and seemingly random waves of "Wa-Lie-Oh", the Young-like vocal drone of "Silo", everything suggests a lucid asylum conquered with repeated personal enlightenments. Meredith Monk is an unknown, cerebral, and well-trained "punk."