6 minute read
bela on the nongak music that inspired them
to their original art forms but with the added knowledge of what they had found elsewhere. It was a huge time of expansiveness. I was very supported by the generation ahead of me, the Fluxus, people who were older than me like Dick Higgins and Jackson Mac Low. Even though they saw my artform was going to be very different, they saw a kindred spirit, really trying to weave together everything. They were fearless and that was inspiring.”
Some of Monk’s early work from that time touched on the political, like much of the folk scene were also doing, but it became much more apparent in later works like science-fiction opera The Games and her meditation on fascism, The Quarry. She says looking back at her old work recently, she was struck by how many of the messages still resonate, especially in light of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.
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“It was very interesting to go back to some of this material, but I don’t think I would’ve done it if it didn’t feel so relevant. I think The Games was very prescient, especially during the Trump period but one could say this period as well. I think it is very prescient of the dark forces that are changing our world right now and I think these things are spirallic. From the late seventies until the early eighties, I was very concerned with reflecting the society that I was living in, art as a kind of reflection and then at that point, after The Games, I realised maybe that’s not that useful.”
Monk’s later compositions took an about turn, offering opportunities for audiences to re-imagine the world in which we live to see “the possibility of transformation” as she terms it, in order to create a better world. “I’d rather work on art as a healing force rather than a mirroring force because I think that there’s a lot of people now that are doing very overtly political work,” she explains. “I always wanted to do poetic work because I’m not analytical like say Brecht was. I feel like I can do more by continuing to offer experiences for people where they remember their basic goodness.”
In her recent trilogy of works, Oh Behalf Of Nature, Cellular Songs and Indra’s Nest, Monk offers a meditation on our relationship with the natural world that encourages listeners to visualise a more connected world: one where people are kinder to one another and to the planet. They manage to be subversively political while also poetic, seemingly marrying Monk’s earlier and later artistic selves.
The works are also preoccupied with death too, the voice as the last instrument now. Monk says the death of her partner caused her to reflect on the cyclic nature of the voice. “When my partner was dying, I would be at the hospital, every day, singing for hours. I’d be singing everything I could think of, everything I ever wrote, every folk song I knew. She was in a coma, and I felt like my voice was a beacon where you know no matter where her consciousness was, she would hear that. The voice cuts through everything and it’s so fundamental to us, it’s so deeply connected to the human heart.”
Monk says the fragility of life felt more apparent to her in the last few years, the combined effect of losing her partner, the pandemic and her own increasing age. She’s having lots of thoughts right now of how to “pass on” her difficult-to-pindown catalogue of vocal sounds, how to write her “memoirs” and how, she smiles, she is “now like, gee, I’m warming up for almost as long as the concert lasts...my DNA has caught up a little bit!” She’s also been ruminating on art and whether or not it can survive the detriment of the last two years. “I was having some dark thoughts during the pandemic like will art be essential? Will people appreciate how essential
Monk was relieved to be back on stage recently and is currently in the middle of rehearsals for her first UK and European shows since 2013, including Rewire where she is performing Memory Game — a collection drawn from nine of her different theatrical productions that span 1983 — 2006 — and Cellular Songs, her most recent work from 2018. “Nothing substitutes for the live experience, nothing, because energy is very real,” she says, still on a high from a recent performance of Duet Behaviour with long-term friend and collaborator John Hollenbeck. They’d done an online version of the show during lockdown, but Monk says it wasn’t the same.
“Watching performances on screens is so flat, you don’t really get the energy that you get in live performance, the energy that just stays with the audience and the performer for a long time afterwards,” Monk says. “With a screen, it’s just, well, over and then it just kind of goes into the garbage pail with all the other online shows. Live performance seems to stay with people for much longer.”
“The live performance experience is so vulnerable — we are all in the same moment. We’re all in the now together, the performers and the audience, and so there’s a kind of exchange of energy, an interaction. I think in my case, by not using words, or using them very sparingly, it becomes even more of a direct, relatable experience for everyone — and the possibility of transformation there is powerful.”
In between preparing for her upcoming live shows, working on another album and art installation, Monk says she still listens avidly to music when not creating. She’s a huge Radiohead fan — “I love them, they’re my favourites!” — and enjoys seeing connections in her work to others. “Some of the Radiohead songs I feel I could’ve written. The first song on Kid A [‘Everything In Its Right Place’] I feel like I could’ve written. The piano chords in that, reminds me so much of my own music in a way,” she says. Björk is another artist where Monk can see touchstones. Björk has spoken about Monk’s influence on her work previously and Monk recently revealed the pair are in frequent contact.
Looking forward, Monk says she has no plans for any big birthday celebrations: she just wants to keep creating. She is happy, though, that a box set of all her recordings is being released this autumn to coincide with her birthday milestone. Listeners will be able to hear all her vocal work in one place for the first time. “I hope that it encourages people to stay curious,” she says of her body of work. “And to not be afraid. Go as far into your dream as possible and find your own unique voice. Be guided by your voice.”
This article is produced by The Quietus
On their most recent EP Guidelines, the South Korean producer and performer bela has found a mesmerising way to transpose traditional nongak sheet music to frantic electronic music that borders on radical club music and power electronics. “I embraced the contemporary club culture because the aux cord is shared now.”
The past gets warped into grotesque and overwhelming club music on Guidelines, the most recent EP by the South Korean producer bela. The main inspiration for their rhythmically agile and stylistically bold music has been South Korean nongak music. In a correspondence over mail, the producer — set to make their European debut during Rewire — dives deeper into the historic roots of their forward-thinking electronic music. Context — 15
