I often think about the summer, and yesterday an early-summer afternoon came to my mind - in that afternoon I was preparing to my math comprehensive exam and in the background I was listening to this album. That evening there was a huge storm, so these memories are connected now. You can see the dark clouds on the picture.
Meredith Monk is a singer who has developed her own, very strange and special singing style and technics. Her music can be minimal, energetic, beautiful, sad, pleasant, and sometimes irritating - in the same time. Probably it will take some time for accepting it by the listener - or it won't even happen. But I always think that every music needs a mood (or weather) for listening and every mood (or weather) can find a music which suits it.
Dolmen music comes from an other, imaginary world. The picture above represents it very well: people sitting around a table - we don't know who are they, why are they there and what are they doing. Listen to the choir in the beginning of the last track: it gets louder and more detailed at every new part, making an atmosphere where we can see more and more from an unknown place - the melody is serious and strict (I think there was a long preparation period before the recording - and there's a microphone on that table but I don't know that they did it in the reality or it's just a design element - I hope the first).
Near the end there's a cool, enchanting melody by a chello, using it in an unconventional way. In the video (from 3:00) you can see as they are beating the strings by the bow and drum sticks.
It's recorded in 1980 and 81, and released by ECM records.
http://www.last.fm/music/Meredith+Monk/+videos/+1-CyA19sVeRPw
No comments:
Post a Comment