Meredith Monk Will Celebrate New Album With A Listening Party At National Sawdust

National Sawdust will host an album listening party for Meredith Monk’s Cellular Songs on Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. at 80 North 6th Street in Brooklyn. Attendees will experience the full recording in the venue’s immersive sonic environment alongside Monk and contributing artists. CDs will be available for purchase. Tickets and information are available through National Sawdust.

Cellular Songs marks Monk’s first new ECM New Series release since 2016’s On Behalf of Nature and her first album with the label following the 2022 box set Meredith Monk: The Recordings. The project is the second in a trilogy of interdisciplinary works reflecting on the natural world, turning inward to the “very fabric of life”—drawing inspiration from cellular processes including replication, division, and mutation. Monk has described the piece as an artistic proposal for “cooperation, interdependence, and kindness” amid a destabilized contemporary landscape.

The album features Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble members Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, and Allison Sniffin, with Sniffin and John Hollenbeck contributing piano, violin, vibraphone, percussion, and crotales. Much of the score is written for wordless voice and body percussion, with “Happy Woman” as the sole texted song. Monk cites the work’s sculptural forms, chromatic harmonies, and multidimensional musical structures as a further evolution of her compositional language.

Premiered at BAM’s Harvey Theater in 2018, Cellular Songs was praised by the Financial Times as “a deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society.” In the album’s booklet, writer Bonnie Marranca situates the piece within Monk’s longstanding fusion of spiritual practice and performance.