Meredith Monk - Key

Pitchfork 87

In the 1990s, when director Jean-Luc Godard started getting wilder with his sound design, he sampled excerpts of Meredith Monk’s ululating vocal performances in films like Nouvelle Vague. The vocal ensemble she has led for decades keeps drawing crowds at venues like the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival. In recent years, Monk’s orchestral music has been championed by the St. Louis Symphony. Monk remains a powerful figure in American art, and her twin legacies as visionary experimental singer and contemporary classical composer have long seemed secure.

Her reputation continues to grow thanks to new touring stage-shows and albums like 2016’s On Behalf of Nature (which started as a dramatic piece and was later adapted into a recording). As a veteran of New York’s famed late-’60s underground, Monk has achieved a rare distinction—her recent work tends to get more attention than the music she made in her breakthrough, bohemian decade. In a reissue-mad culture that can wilt from the task of keeping up with experimentalists, later in their careers, this is no small thing. Though it does mean that the first records are still there to be rediscovered.

In 1971, Monk released her first album, Key, on the Los Angeles-based imprint Increase Records. Before too long, the original issue went out of print. Key was subsequently reissued on LP (and then CD) by Mimi Johnson’s Lovely Music. For 2017’s Record Store Day, Tompkins Square has licensed the album from Lovely to make Key’s first new vinyl pressing in decades. Its first two tracks are still mind-blowers. The a cappella opener, “Porch,” showed how much variety Monk could wring from a single vocal hook—thanks to her many vocal production styles. In the space of a couple minutes, the singer switches from brash, nasally sounds to more vulnerable, weepy expressions.

“Understreet” follows this with a repetitive keyboard line, which blares from Monk’s electric organ. This punching figure creates steady support for an even stranger vocal part. The title of this piece makes for one of the rare, discernible words you can hear in Monk’s often-abstract vocals. At first, she stretches out enunciations of “understreet” via keening, edgy timbres: a different sort of subterranean, homesick blues. Then, without warning, Monk shows off a jarring purity, reeling off a fast series of straight-tone, staccato notes. Compared with the song’s initial approach, these pitches dance with a renewed lease on pleasure. In a few short minutes, Monk creates multiple new sound-worlds, writing distinct kinds of folk music for the different populations within them.

From the beginning, Monk conceived of her work in multimedia terms, often linking her 16mm films and live music performance in installation art settings. Her description of Key as a work of “invisible theater” is bolstered not just by the dramatic nature of her performances, but by a variety of interludes. At the end of “Understreet,” the sound of feet exiting from a stage dispels the sense that you’re listening to a traditional album. A series of abstract monologues—all with the title “Vision” (and voiced by Monk colleagues Lanny Harrison and Mark Berger)—feels like the work of some modernized Greek chorus.

Side A concludes with “Fat Stream,” an early example of what would come to be a standing feature in this artist’s catalog: the Monk lullaby. Over organ chords and a steady drone note, Monk sings some gorgeous lines full of comfort—while at other points, she bends select tones in ways that vibrate madly against the keyboard music. On Side B, Key’s final two tracks also introduce new elements. The overdubbed “Change” features a crew of “companion voices” (including Fluxus artist Dick Higgins). And “Dungeon” thrums along with a steady percussive part that results in a spooky close for the album.

The new Tompkins Square vinyl reissue preserves the sense of warmth—as well as some of the original distortion—that previous reissues have displayed. This new release also has a more sharply rendered cover, offering a view of Monk in one of her early stage getups. But if you can’t track down one of the limited RSD-vinyl editions, don’t fret: the Lovely CD continues to offer a sterling version of this same important music. When Monk recorded these pieces, she was still a few years away from the perfection of Dolmen Music, or the sumptuousness of her later opera, Atlas. But she was already a force of experimental nature.