Sequenza21

Zeelie Brown, the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling (NWAM202)

Essvus, What Ails You (NWAM201)

Ruby Colley & EXAUDI, Hello Halo (NWAM200)

Travis Laplante & JACK Quartet, String Quartets (NWAM199)

Based on the evidence provided by this exciting quartet of recent releases, the sails on New Amsterdam Records’ windmill rotate with ever-increasing productivity, invention and creativity these days.

The two most recent recordings, the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling by cellist and multimedia artist Zeelie Brown and What Ails You by Essvus, deal directly with social, political, and personal issues.

Part of NewAm’s new series of composer’s lab releases, Brown’s debut album offers timely and sobering reflections on the politics of race in American history. As stated in the opening track “let go, let god,” also featuring Sierra Leonean-American singer and composer YATTA, “this album is a prayer for anybody looking at injustice and just needing the inspiration to stand up and fight.”

Brown’s arresting yet compelling concept album speaks to these matters with clarity, compassion, conviction and some urgency. In “gossamer,” Brown’s voice is placed in passionate counterpoint to floating, silky-sounding chords, while in the anti-capitalist diatribe “i pray for this country,” electronically generated beeps intersect with a soulful Bill Withers-style harmonic sequence on piano.

Two instrumental interludes foreground Brown’s skills as cellist—the first a soaring, freewheeling improvisation, the second modelled on a descending Chopin-like lament bass. A similar chaconne-type sequence on piano echoes through the empty corridors of “in the waters between life and death,” whose lyric is located in the queer clubs of the 1980’s during the AIDS pandemic, and with the plight of its shattered and slighted communities.

Powered by restless African-inspired rhythms and pulses (as heard in “mbele”), perhaps it’s inevitable that comparisons will be drawn with contemporary cellists such as Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Abel Selacoe, and Vincent Ségal, who have likewise interrogated the chequered histories of their own cultural backgrounds in relation to race and political history. Nevertheless, Brown’s corporeal music emanates powerfully from within, inseparable from its (or their) own body and the physicality of sound.

This sense of self-presence manifests itself just as strikingly in Brown’s vocal extemporizations, where swooping falsetto lines carry within them striking authenticity. Brown’s falsetto is the antithesis of false-etto, its unique sound a mix of vocal styles and gestures—Nina Simone (who is quoted in “in the waters”), Sylvester, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, Jimmy Somerville of The Communards, and Anohni (previously Antony and the Johnsons), spring to mind.

In comparison, the nine-track What Ails You by Essvus (aka Gen Morigami) projects more raw and edgy qualities. Brown’s polyrhythmic Latin-American percussion patterns are replaced with industrial metallic noises, pounding found objects, clanging alarm bells, and Hüsker Dü-type screaming guitars, as heard on the opening track “Inner Violence.” The album comes across as a drawn-out primal scream—Edvard Munch in freeze-frame slow-motion—which is hardly surprising given that What Ails You is the result of Essvus’s struggles with mental health and familial estrangement.

The most intense tracks mesh gritty rhythms with manipulated vocal gestures and phrases, as heard on the unbalanced and disorientated, Sonic Youth-like “To Not Think.” Treated vocal interjections also underpin the sound-collage-heavy “Warmth,” its percussive wall-of-sound and sped-up speech utterances suggesting the influence of experimental rock duo Battles. Dystopian drum and bass patterns rattle through the rhythmic rubble of “Moldsporing” and “Every Hope, A Dream, A Prayer,” while “Counterfactuals” sets off as a Joy Division homage before spiralling into space-age The Doors, trippy disco, and glitchy musique concrete.

Despite the tangle of seemingly incompatible styles and influences, the end result makes marvellous sense, albeit in a twisted, contorted way.

There are quieter moments, too, such as in “Anaesthetic Midnight”—whose sounds appear to have been fed through a giant reverb wormhole—or the dreamy opening to “Hell and High Water.” During these moments, Essvus almost flirts with beauty. In What Ails You, one is left not so much with a ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ but instead a ‘Law of Increasing Returns’: the more one listens to the album, the more one is struck by the detail buried inside its strange, solipsistic sound world.

A far gentler world engulfs Ruby Colley’s six-track EP Hello Halo. The talented, versatile composer, violinist and sound artist teams up with the excellent Exaudi vocal ensemble to present a suite that explores the intersection between contemporary music and health and wellbeing. The idea behind Hello Halo came from Colley’s experiences of growing up with her brother, Paul, who is neurodivergent and non-speaking. Despite Paul’s inability to communicate via ‘everyday’ language, Colley recorded the rich range of sounds and gestures her brother makes, using his voice and other recordings to provide a vocal map for the music.

The result works both on a purely musical and programmatic (i.e., extra-musical) level—musical in the way in which Colley marries her brother’s vocal gestures with extended vocal and string techniques, and ‘programmatic’ because the suite operates effectively as a kind of “day in the life” of Ruby and Paul.

Given the self-imposed limitations (six voices, solo violin, soundtrack), Hello Halo is surprisingly varied in scope. “What Is It” is almost madrigal-like, the two “Duets” more fragmentary and collage-like, “Echoes” blending hocket-like textures with a quote from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the alphabet-inspired “Cosmology” more earthy and folk-like.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the influence of Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Caroline Shaw comes across at various points—such as in the layered entries and stacked harmonies in the title track. Nevertheless, the use of such techniques in the context of the “non-verbal” world in which Paul inhabits yields a unique and different outcome. It’s as if Colley’s music has scraped away at the grain of the voice to capture the character of the person that lies behind it. If ever we needed reassurance that music is the perfect vehicle for communication beyond language and words, here it is.

‘Quartet’ takes on added significance in the last of the four releases surveyed: Travis Laplante’s String Quartets 1 & 2, performed by JACK Quartet.

I had previously listened to, and enjoyed, Human—Laplante’s 2019 album of solo saxophone improvisations—but it hadn’t fully prepared me for his two string quartets. Both contain lyrical qualities, in addition to microtonality, yet these elements are more subtle and integrated in the quartets.

Folklike and wistful, String Quartet No. 1 begins with a kind of pure resonance of the string quartet sound. Subtle use of microtonality gives way to flowing ostinato patterns, suggesting Philip Glass and Michael Nyman’s string quartets but with the added heft of a late Beethoven opus. Part 1 ends with a surge towards a series of flickering, pulsing open fifths.

These buildups are aided by Laplante’s treatment of the quartet as a homogenous physical force. These moments often appear to contain the seeds of their own destruction, collapsing from within. This happens in Part 2 of the String Quartet No. 1, where the process of atrophy ends in a valedictory-style duet between the two violins.

In certain respects, String Quartet No. 2 follows a similar recipe, but the musical outcome is quite different. It opens with the grace, tenderness and beauty of a marriage ceremony, but soon enough the mood changes into something more unsettling. The first violin struggles to extricate itself from the prevailing atmosphere, causing a rift within the ensemble. As in the String Quartet No. 1, the middle section of Part 1 is more free-flowing, ostinato-heavy. Eventually it breaks free via a passage that sounds like neo-microtonal Bartok.

Part 2 begins with a Partita-like passage for solo viola, before being joined by the rest of the quartet. Subtitled “the spirit takes flight after death,” the final section exudes a similar transcendental spirit to the ending of the first quartet, offering a glimmer of hope amidst doubt and uncertainty. Laplante’s aesthetic may be partly grounded in theoretical and conceptual writings on resonances, alternate tunings, and microtonality, but this is not ‘paper music.’ His music has been imagined into being as sonic reality.

As expected, JACK Quartet apply themselves with the same level of interpretative understanding, nuance, accuracy, precision, dedication, and distinction to Laplante’s music as they would, say, a Ligeti or Lachenmann quartet. Laplante’s music draws in the listener, commanding attention and reflection.

Which leads us back to that famous windmill logo again. Established in 2008 by composers Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and William Brittelle, NewAm may not be exactly ‘new’ anymore, but the label is still blazing a trail in those fluid cross genre intersections between experimental and alternative rock, post-classical, post-minimal, and everything-in-between. Powered by the winds of change and innovation, NewAm’s mission has always been to transcend traditional and outdated genre distinctions, offering a home to music that’s stubbornly “outside” and unclassifiable … and all the better because of it.

The acclaimed singer, minimalist and intermedia artist gets a new documentary and a new record

Meredith Monk has long attracted the attention of journalists and filmmakers intrigued by her synthesis of minimalism, vocalism and theater, and by a personality whose conversational informality masks the stoic tenacity that’s propelled one of the most iconic careers of any avant-garde performing artist. Monk in Pieces, premiered in February 2025 and currently touring the indie movie house circuit, is the latest and most biographically-oriented entry in a line of Monk documentaries whose predecessors include Peter Greenaway’s 1983 portrait for BBC 4 (which remains a useful guide to her earliest and most experimental works) and Babeth VanLoo’s 2009 Inner Voice (which emphasizes Monk’s engagement with Buddhism, a topic that receives only glancing attention in Monk in Pieces).

What’s most notable about Monk in Pieces is that it shows its subject, 82 years old at the time of its release, preparing for the inevitable final chapter of her life, whose trajectory is traced in a broad (though not strictly chronological) arc, divided into a dozen-odd chapters each centered (as the title implies) on a single major work. Helping to underscore the theme of mortality is Monk’s pet tortoise Neutron, given to her as a gift by Ping Chong in 1978 and the inspiration for her 1983 album Turtle Dreams. We hear Monk conversing with Neutron (“Do you even know who I am…who’s fed you 42 years? It’s like, what does turtle consciousness tell me?”), and nursing her through an ultimately fatal illness that leads into the film’s final and most touching scene in which Monk is shown by herself contentedly eating a simple supper in the kitchen of the Tribeca loft she’s occupied since 1972.¹ Afterwards she cleans the table, the ritual poignantly accompanied by one of her earliest songs, Do You Be?, first recorded on her 1970 debut album Key (though the version used in the film is a later one from the eponymous 1987 album).

It’s Chong who contributes the film’s most candid and insightful commentary. Four years Monk’s junior, he was her student at NYU in 1970, and later her lover and company member. To the accompaniment of Madwoman’s Vision, he recounts how Monk suggested that they have children together. “I went, ‘Uh, I don’t think so! Artists shouldn’t have kids because the art comes first'”. The tension between family and art turns out to be a recurring theme in Monk’s life. Chong eventually left Monk after a decade to focus on his own art (“I wanted to be a director, and I kept giving her direction when she didn’t want it”). And he attributes much of Monk’s career motivation to the strained relationship she had with her mother, the swing singer Audrey Marsh. (“I think a lot of Meredith’s anger comes from not being valued by her mother. She just wasn’t there for her. And also she had to fight to be accepted in the performing arts world. In a way it’s a fight to survive. Pain is where art comes from, it has to come out of need. EM Forster stopped writing when he found his lover—he was too happy!”).

Monk seems to concur with Chong’s assessment. As Marsh sings These Things You Left Me (she enjoyed great success as a young woman singing jingles for radio commercials before becoming another expendable industry castoff), Monk relates: “She wasn’t home a lot. I was dragged around from job to job when I was a little kid, like going through a meatgrinder. I saw her pain of the conflict between being a mother and being an artist, and that both of them were not 100% satisfying. I vowed that that would never happen to me, and that I wanted to do my own work and make my own path.”

Monk is more circumspect when discussing the other major love interest of her life, the Dutch choreographer Mieke van Hoek, who like Chong was Monk’s student before becoming her partner of two decades. She’s seen only in still photos and silent vignettes, and it was her sudden death of cancer in 2002 that inspired Monk’s Impermanence. But though Monk concedes that “I learned more from [her death] than from anything [else] that ever happened to me—I wasn’t the same person after that”, she declines to tell us just what she learned or how she changed. In contrast to Chong, Monk is a person who only reveal her vulnerabilities through her art.

The remainder of the film is constructed from a montage of mementos, reflections, performance footage, excerpts from Monk’s dream journals (accompanied by cutout animations by Paul Barritt), and testimonials by colleagues and collaborators, some of them archival (including Merce Cunningham, who died in 2009), others shot specifically for the film (such as New Sounds host John Schaefer). Björk makes an appearance on behalf of the younger generation, recounting the impression made by Monk’s 1981 Dolmen Music album when she heard it on her boyfriend’s record player at the age of 16. As the soundtrack dissolves from Monk’s recording of the track Gotham Lullaby to Björk’s own 1999 cover, the uninhibited Icelander—apparently harboring a dim view of lower Manhattan—opines “her loft that she’s lived in for half a century is an oasis in a toxic environment, and I feel that Gotham Lullaby represents that as well”.

In another vignette Monk describes the strabismus (eye misalignment) that plagued her as a child. “I wasn’t able to see out of both eyes simultaneously”, so her mother took her to Dalcroze eurhythmics from ages 3–7 to help with the integration of body and rhythm. Monk approvingly cites Dalcroze’s assertion that “all musical ideas come from the body”. (“Ding! I think that’s where I’m coming from.”). And on other occasions she’s credited Dalcroze with “influencing everything I’ve done. It’s why dance and movement and film are so integral to my music. It’s why I see music so visually”—a key to one of the fundamental differences between her approach and the more formal and abstracted patterns of the classic minimalists.

Monk In Pieces is very much an in-house affair. It was co-produced by longtime Monk ensemble member Katie Geissinger, whose husband, Billy Shebar, directed it. And as might be expected, it occasionally drifts into hagiography, most notably in the montages of bad reviews and—in the case of Atlas (1991)—snarky communications with Monk’s collaborators at Houston Grand Opera, all serving to invoke the time-honored fable of the misunderstood genius who’s ultimately vindicated. Chong also picks up this trope (“Critics were saying that what she was doing was nonsensical, was crazy, was not serious.”), and it’s true that Monk was the target of harsh invective from the notoriously snobbish Clive Barnes during the 1970s. But other critics were more supportive, including Barnes’ New York Times colleague Anna Kisselgoff, who praised the 1969 premiere of Juice at the Guggenheim Museum. Notwithstanding her detractors, it was the modern dance community, already largely dominated by women, that took Monk seriously well before she’d established much credibility with musicians. Ironically by the mid-1980s those attitudes had largely flipped, with composers reacting favorably to the long forms and newfound sophistication of Dolmen Music (compared to the more embryonic Key and Our Lady of Late), while dancers were more inclined to dismiss her choreography as amateurish (“Her movements haven’t evolved, they’re just doing shuffle steps in unison” was one New York choreographer’s complaint).

I would have preferred to hear less from the celebrity talking heads (including an original Talking Head, David Berne) and more insight into Monk’s early years, especially her time in Los Angeles in the late 1960s when she belonged to Frank Zappa’s extended circle (she appears as the ”Red Face Girl” in Zappa’s film Uncle Meat, and her housemate and music director was Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston, who is still alive and lucid in his 90s). I’d also be interested to know why, despite having been in fairly close proximity to the Bay Area origins of classic minimalism, Monk has seldom embraced La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Stimmung, or the triumvirate of Riley, Reich and Glass as formative influences. But whatever might appear on one’s list of omissions, it’s still gratifying to revisit many of the now-obscure source materials that did make it into Monk in Pieces, including Phill Niblock’s original film documentation of Juice.

Coming on the heels of Monk in Pieces is Cellular Songs, Monk’s latest release for the ECM label, extending a storied discography that commenced with Dolmen Music, and which now encompasses 13 albums, of which the first twelve were repackaged and given an new and expanded accompanying booklet in the 2022 compilation Meredith Monk: The Recordings, cherishingly assembled by ECM for her 80th birthday (it was one of my picks for that year). Cellular Songs features Monk’s all-female vocal ensemble in a medley of mostly unaccompanied songs (with piano, simple percussion instruments or hambone-style body percussion making the occasional appearance). Only one of the songs (Happy Woman) has a text. In the aforementioned Peter Greenaway documentary Monk proclaims “I don’t really have contempt for the word. I have contempt when the word is used as the glue of something, which has happened in theater and a lot of film”). Indeed, it’s Monk’s avoidance of texts that has helped keep her often joyful music from running aground on the shoals of sentimentality.

The titular reference of Cellular Songs is to biological cells (“the fundamental unit of life”), not to mobile phones. And the music is subdued but affirmational. In Monk in Pieces, the composer says “In the 80s I was doing apocalyptic pieces [e.g., Quarry and Book of Days], and then I started thinking about how maybe offering an alternative was more useful”. With Monk’s still-capable but undeniably aging voice in the forefront, and with the sparse texture conjuring the sound world of her early recordings more than her recent excursions with larger forces (e.g., Songs of Ascension), it reads like a bookend to Dolmen Music—a gentle lullaby for the faithful from the twilight of her career.

When assessing the oeuvre and legacy of Meredith Monk, there’s a sum-of-the-parts factor that Philip Glass alludes to in Monk in Pieces: “The thing about Meredith is, she was a self-contained theater company. She among all of us was the uniquely gifted one [as a performer]”. Monk’s talent as a singer, including a three-octave range and command of ululations and other extended techniques, is undeniable. And by emphasizing the voice she stands apart from the classic minimalists, including Glass, who tended to treat singers as part of a larger instrumental group. In other respects, though, she’s often been accused of dilettantism—a jill of all trades, but not a master composer, choreographer or dramatist. In some ways her reception has been similar to Alwin Nikolais’, who began as a musician, learned the theatrical crafts of lighting and costuming, and ultimately became known primarily as a choreographer and teacher, but was seldom cited as an exemplar by specialists in any of those fields. It was rather the totality of his futuristic visual and auditory spectacles that drove his influence and reputation.

Interestingly, one of Monk’s key teachers at Sarah Lawrence College was a Nikolais alum (Beverly Schmidt Blossom). And like Nikolais, her greatest impression may ultimately be felt in the domain of new music theater, an area where she’s remained a bona fide avant-gardist, eschewing text-centric storytelling and the trappings of traditional opera that Glass retreated to after Einstein on the Beach in favor of wordless, non-linear forms, often in service to female-centered narratives.

Speaking about Education of the Girlchild (1973), whose plot—such as it is—proceeds in reverse chronological order, Monk said: “I don’t really feel that by nature I’m a political artist. The piece has six women characters. Usually you’ll see men-bonded groups like The Seven Samurai or the Knights of the Round Table. You don’t usually see six strong women who are not angry women but are just fulfilled women as the main heroes of an artwork”.² Whatever one thinks of Monk’s simple, ambient-adjacent music, it’s hard not to be impressed by her corpus of aesthetically radical multimedia works that manage to avoid the clichés of both strident militantism and New Age sentimentality.

Toward the end of Monk in Pieces, Monk embraces a sentiment expressed earlier by Ping Chong: “Doing the work is still meaningful. The other stuff just falls away. Maybe this whole thing is a way that I created something to affirm that I exist.” There may or may not be anything genuinely new in the film or in Cellular Songs, but both do justice to a career that’s remarkable for its meaning, resilience, and impact.

[1] a six-story L-shaped building on West Broadway that also once housed Roulette Intermedium
[2] recounted in Sidsel Mundal’s 1994 film Meredith Monk

Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center, Krakow, November 22, 2025

One cannot draw too many conclusions from the evidence of one concert, of course, but from the rich wealth and diverse array of live electronics, multimedia, sound design and improvisation presented at Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center in Krakow on November 22, 2025, it appears that the Polish new music scene is undergoing something of a creative resurgence.

In the presence of a packed and enthusiastic audience, Teresa Virginia Salis’s Natural Paths, for alto flute, electronics and video, took the listener out of the performance space and deep into the natural world. I was fortunate enough to catch a presentation by Salis earlier in the day at the Krzysztof Penderecki Academy of Music on Listening Soundscapes. The Sardinia-born musician talked at length about an aesthetic approach rooted in residual spaces and sonic environments, where sound mapping, bioacoustics, and ecological memory intermingle and coalesce.

Salis originally trained as a flautist, and one can see how the instrument’s associations with nature, wind, breath, and pulse has led the composer to explore soundscapes that often go unnoticed, but which nevertheless exert their own haunting, living presence and beauty. As Gilles Clément’s concept of the ‘third landscape’ suggests, such sounds resonate with the undetermined fragments of a planetary garden. Salis cites Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Max Neuhaus and Ryoichi Kurokawa (among several other names) as influences, but her evocative and alluring soundscapes inhabit unique qualities of their own. Natural Paths made me want to hear more from the Italian composer, which is always a positive litmus test for musical durability.

A very different kind of immersive experience belonged to percussionist Adam Gołębiewski’s live extemporisations. On one level, his thirty-minute Untitled, for drums, objects, and electronics, was an assault on the senses: viscerality cranked to the max. Gołębiewski’s Jackson Pollock-esque sweeping and circling hand-cymbal movements across the diameter of an upturned bass drum generated a series of loud cloud-like sound masses, evoking Helmut Lachenmann’s instrumental musique concrète style. Some in the audience struggled to cope with the sonic bombardment, shielding their ears during much of the performance.

Grappling with the raw physicality of sound, Gołębiewski’s performance practice was striking and original, suggesting comparisons with a latter-day Han Bennink. During a short intermission that followed Gołębiewski’s piece, I quizzed the percussionist about his frame of reference. He paused, signposted me to an interview he gave with Claire Biddles in The Quietus earlier this year, and uttered one name: Xenakis. Perhaps the key to the new music of today can be found in Pléïades, then…

With Gołębiewski’s large-scale sweeping gestures still ringing in my ears, Anna Jędrzejewska’s Talkativeness of Trees, for live electronics, inhabited a very different world: tiny timbral fragments placed underneath a sonic microscope. Kamil Kowalski’s accompanying video did much to guide the listener’s gaze in similar ways. Its impact was gently subversive. Perhaps the devil is in the detail after all.

The evening ended with Krakow-based R2 (Kuba Rutkowsi on drums and Redink Thomas on live electronics), whose music seemed to take the patterns and pulses of electronic dance music and feed it through something akin to an interplanetary recycling cyberpunk machine, resulting in something that sounded strange yet familiar.

I didn’t stay on for the Audio Art Festival’s closing afterparty at 11pm. The concert itself had overrun and it was getting late. Walking back to the hotel as the snow fell steadily on Krakow’s picturesque buildings and quiet cobbled streets, I reflected further on today’s new music scene in Poland. With rock musicians such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield acknowledging the influence of composers such as Lutosławski, Penderecki and Bogusław Schaeffer, perhaps now is the time to look forward to new generations living and working in Poland who push musical boundaries. Having been established for over thirty years, the Audio Art Festival under the guidance and leadership of composer, sound artist, performer and mentor Marek Chołoniewski, remains at the centre of new music innovations in this country. It will be interesting to see how things develop during the next few years and decades.