Meredith Monk
mercy

Meredith Monk voice
Theo Bleckmann voice
Allison Easter voice
Katie Geissinger voice
Ching Gonzalez voice
Allison Sniffin voice, piano, synthesizer, viola, violin
John Hollenbeck voice, percussion, melodica, piano
Bohdan Hilash clarinets
Recorded March 19/20, 2002

I regularly have dreams about flying. Said ability never comes, however, without focused and sustained effort on my part. In order to achieve flight, I must push against the air with my arms, gaining height ever so incrementally—sometimes losing altitude on the downswing—until I am in a position to navigate obstacles such as buildings, trees, and power lines. If these dreams had a soundtrack, it might sound something like Volcano Songs, for here is a space in which the human voice soars, to be sure, but not without the utmost discipline on the part of its performers. The “rudimentary” nature of this album serves to accommodate its broader wingspan, thereby widening…

http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/

by Helen Reddington

Historically, women have not been associated with technology unless it helped with the housework – vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines – or their fertility (ten years ago I did a search for women+technology and was rewarded with a pageful of sites offering reproductive technology solutions). In times of war, we were useful as code-breakers and navigators; suddenly our supposedly non-mathematical brains develop useful ‘male’ attributes that disappear as soon as peace resumes. Women were at the forefront of computing in the 1940s (see I Code Like a Girl). In the competitive world of the music industry, the marketing of women’s sexuality has always been to the forefront, conveniently stereotyping women as singers, and men as instrumentalists or controllers of sound production. This stereotype appears to be impossible to shake off.