Meredith Monk

[Mobbd]

Members of this forum (if my own experience is anything to go by) will know Meredith Monk from RLM's Best of the Worst on which they ripped the absolute piss out of Monk's Turtle Dreams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4eSVXCzRyI

She is a real-deal avant garde composer though, and 6Music's Freakzone recently did an episode dedicated to her. Once you've got over the silliness, she is pretty interesting if you like that sort of thing (and I do!). Nice strings.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000syxl

The show has some appropriately-chosen other stuff to enjoy too. Ivor Cutler. Nico. Laurie Anderson.

[Mobbd]

The Meredith Monk album focussed on by Freakzone is called Dolmen Music (1981) for anyone who wants to stick that in their Spotify/YouTube system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmen_Music

[Pauline Walnuts]

Members of this forum (if my own experience is anything to go by) will know Meredith Monk from RLM's Best of the Worst on which they ripped the absolute piss out of Monk's Turtle Dreams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4eSVXCzRyI

Oh, go on then,

[chveik]

Members of this forum (if my own experience is anything to go by) will know Meredith Monk from RLM's Best of the Worst on which they ripped the absolute piss out of Monk's Turtle Dreams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4eSVXCzRyI

what a bunch of thick nerd cunts

[Mr_Simnock]

female phil minton?

[sevendaughters]

surprised that those four jaded guys who usually spend weeks on end praising the worst mass media ever made couldn't get anything from Turtle Dreams

[purlieu]

Dolmen Music is an astonishingly beautiful album. I find a lot her works a touch too unsettling and/or shrill for my ears, to the extent that she has lots of albums that I only half enjoy, but Dolmen Music works for me start to finish. 'Gotham Lullaby' is heartbreakingly beautiful, and the 'Rain' section of the title track is so wonderfully evocative. There's still a fair amount of her music I haven't got around to listening to. Should do that soon.

[McFlymo]

She's class.
I especially love Book of Days
https://open.spotify.com/album/3cipth0yy9U68h8nHXMRFC?si=KsDhIejKTj-mP4OelOW9-w

[buttgammon]

I don't know what RLM's Best of the Worst is, but I do know Monk is great. Dolmen Music deserves the love it's getting, and I'm also really into her more recent album On Behalf of Nature.

Dolmen Music is an astonishingly beautiful album. I find a lot her works a touch too unsettling and/or shrill for my ears, to the extent that she has lots of albums that I only half enjoy, but Dolmen Music works for me start to finish. 'Gotham Lullaby' is heartbreakingly beautiful, and the 'Rain' section of the title track is so wonderfully evocative. There's still a fair amount of her music I haven't got around to listening to. Should do that soon.

This is also my experience of some of her stuff - I'm especially thinking Do You Be, which is hit-and-miss, but happens to contain a few gems, including this one that I was mildly obsessed with a few years ago.

[chveik]

surprised that those four jaded guys who usually spend weeks on end praising the worst mass media ever made couldn't get anything from Turtle Dreams

Turtle Dreams is lovely, it's hardly the most challenging avant-garde music out there. haven't these guys ever watched a film scored by Glass or Nyman?

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Never dug people like Monk or Laurie Anderson or Yoko type New York loft clique.

Somehow it's always carried an impression of a wealthy smug self-satisfaction. Don't @ me

[SpiderChrist]

what a bunch of thick nerd cunts

My thoughts exactly.

[DrGreggles]

I'm with RLM on this one.

[Gregory Torso]

this one

This is utterly beautiful, thank you.

[Phil_A]

To be fair to the RLM crew they had a stab at interpreting what they were watching even if most of them hated it. Josh was at least familiar with Meredith Monk and he was as baffled by it as all of them.

It's the kind of thing that viewed without any context or explanation just looks like a parody of bad performance art, maybe it is, I don't know.

[DrGreggles]

To be fair to the RLM crew they had a stab at interpreting what they were watching even if most of them hated it. Josh was at least familiar with Meredith Monk and he was as baffled by it as all of them.

It's the kind of thing that viewed without any context or explanation just looks like a parody of bad performance art, maybe it is, I don't know.

And they're specifically reviewing the video and not the music.

[kngen]

I like Meredith Monk's music but my reaction to that video was very much along the lines of RLM's. I suppose you're supposed to feel that way, given the way it's framed, but that's my general reaction to performance art/modern dance etc, anyway: Nice songs, shame about the videos.

[danwho9]

Do like Dolmen Music quite a lot. I haven't really got into much other ECM stuff yet though.

[Mobbd]

Like a lot of the things they review on Wheel of the Worst, the humour comes from the video's lack of context. The question is: "What IS this?" It's partly willful ignorance for comic effect on behalf of RLM but it's partly the very real fault of the people who made the video: I mean, what IS it? If I saw something similar in context at a weird music festival or framed with a bit of history on Freakzone, I'd accept it as a real piece of art. But this video tape just floating around with no context? It's bizarre.

[sevendaughters]

just accept it for what it is and don't try and impute too much false friends like social class or medium in which it arrived or what you traditionally expect, fair enough if you don't like it (not sure I would watch more than once a decade) but nearly all critique I hear reeks of tone-deaf entitled blokedom.