“The most boring fulfilment of expectation is to assume that a composer who openly affiliates with the BDSM community, claims feminism, and adores fine champagne must produce radical, extreme, sensation-driven music.
Monika refuses this – deliberately or otherwise. She rejects not only that expectation, but also the clichés of fragility, intimacy, and the exhausted fiction of a “Baltic aesthetic.”
Her musical language is jouissance crystallised into form: fetishistic aureoles as canon, Dantean harmony, and a persistent tension between technical restraint and an obsessive pursuit of text. A miniature for voice and piano or a celestial, architectural strike in the name of the Marquis de Sade – it makes no difference. The structure is the same: a self-perpetuating loop of desire.
This loop turns within the sacred acoustics of the choir.
This is not provocation. Not shock. It is a condition. A discipline: to practise, through music, that which music itself – as an eternal promise – cannot deliver.
Reminder: beneath the church vaults, a small fetishistic aureole is always watching you.”
— NIM