Artists:
Meredith Monk (voice), Katie Geissinger (voice), Allison Sniffin (voice, violin, piano),
Joanna Lynn-Jacobs (voice), Ellen Fisher (voice), John Hollenbeck (percussion, vibraphone)
Label: ECM Records
Release year: 2025
Producers: Meredith Monk, Allison Sniffin, with John Hollenbeck
Recorded: January–March 2022 / March 2024, Power Station Studios (New York)
Available on all streaming platforms
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
More than fifty years after redefining the expressive possibilities of the human voice, Meredith Monk continues to move with an artistic curiosity that feels almost timeless. Her new album, Cellular Songs, extends a career that has shaped contemporary music, performance and vocal art since the late 1960s — a career recognised this year with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale Musica.
This album takes the cell—the basic unit of life—as its conceptual and structural nucleus. Monk treats the cell not only as a biological entity but also as a metaphor for interdependence, cooperation and the delicate systems that sustain our world. The music mirrors this idea with textures that grow, divide and recombine, forming a vocal ecosystem in constant movement. Patterns shift by millimetres; microtones slide between pitches; voices weave in close harmony as if communicating through a language older than words.
The human body is the true protagonist here. Nearly every sound emerges from it: breath, resonance, friction, clicks, body percussion and fine microtonal lines. Piano and vibraphone appear in only a handful of tracks, functioning less as accompaniment than as gentle illumination of the larger vocal architecture. Monk’s long-standing interest in the relationship between sound and movement is palpable; even in audio form, one senses bodies organising themselves, like cells arranging into form.
Although the underlying construction is intricate — subtle harmonic shifts, three-dimensional forms, interlocking rhythmic cells — the listening experience is surprisingly accessible and transparent. Many pieces unfold with the clarity of simple melodies or repeated gestures. Some even echo traditional song forms, which Monk then expands through extended vocal techniques, microtonal inflections and physical sound. It is a music that can feel ancient, contemporary and quietly radical all at once.
Text is almost entirely absent. Monk chooses to communicate through sound rather than language, creating a kind of pre-verbal musical space. The only exception is “Happy Woman”, where she introduces a brief spoken monologue delivered with theatrical clarity. The sudden arrival of words — after nearly an hour of pure vocal sound — has a striking, almost unsettling effect, as if the music momentarily shifts into another dimension.
Monk has always existed between categories: contemporary classical, minimalism, experimental music, vocal art, performance. But her influence on the broader landscape of new music is undeniable, and her work forms part of the lineage that shapes today’s understanding of contemporary classical music in its broadest sense. Her practice, interdisciplinary and rooted in the body, sits naturally within the editorial horizon of Moto Perpetuo.
Cellular Songs is a luminous, finely crafted album by an artist who continues to reveal new layers of her language. At 83, Monk still surprises — not by changing direction, but by distilling her universe with extraordinary precision. This is music that invites close listening, offering both simplicity on the surface and intricate life beneath it, like a cell seen under magnification.
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