Mummer Love with Patti Smith, by Soundwalk Collective

Mummer Love with Patti Smith

by Soundwalk Collective

supported by

Personae something special...an ecstatic listening experience...a sonic intercontinental experience...you simply have to listen to this

more...

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

£7 GBP or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Includes unlimited streaming of Mummer Love with Patti Smith via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 3 days

Purchasable with gift card

£9.99 GBP or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Clear Double Vinyl

Includes unlimited streaming of Mummer Love with Patti Smith via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 3 days

5 remaining

Purchasable with gift card

£22.99 GBP or more

1.	Aw Abadir 01:15	buy track
2.	La Maison de Rimbaud 10:01	buy track
3.	Eternity 06:48	buy track
4.	Song Of The Highest Tower 04:38	buy track
5.	Mummer Love 08:36	buy track
6.	Farewell 08:18	buy track
7.	Bad Blood 07:53	buy track
8.	Sensation 03:58	buy track

about

A sonic cross-continental experience, Mummer Love is the second album in the Perfect Vision triptych collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith. For this body of work, Soundwalk Collective journeyed to Africa to explore the intricacies of Arthur Rimbaud’s most obscure period. After leaving France and what he deemed the ‘western stagnation’, Rimbaud found himself in Harar, Ethiopia – an epicenter of Sufism in Africa. Sufi practise focuses on the renunciation of worldly things, the purification of the soul and the mystical contemplation of God’s nature. Sufism is a mystical form of Islam, and its music is about reaching a communal ecstatic state, and once you find yourself there, you are granted access to the unknown. The Soundwalk Collective spent time with the Sufi group of Sheikh Ibrahim to record their music and chants in the shrine with the use of Audio-Technica microphones. “You obtain connections to other levels of yourself and consciousness,” Stephan Crasneanscki mentions of the musical process. “This connection, like poetry, is a universal language.
A language of the soul, for the soul.”

As with the other albums in the triptych, the Collective searched for hidden, earthy sounds that hold memories and embed existence. For Mummer Love, they also found themselves recording under the tree where Rimbaud photographed the shrine of Sheik Abadir Umar ar-Rida al Harari, the founder of the holy city Harar. “As the rain fell, I wondered if I was hearing the drops hitting the leaves the same way Rimbaud did 140 years ago,” Crasneanscki says. These sounds and Sufi chants coexist with Patti Smith’s interpretation of Rimbaud’s poems, as she recites and sings among them in a call and response, sharing the same musical and spiritual space.

Smith’s only poem is the title track, “Mummer Love”, written to Rimbaud; her words are rooted in multiple aspects of the self: from the passion of a lover to the care of a mother, and everything in between. Further contributions to this LP come from Mulatu Astatke, widely considered the father of Ethio-jazz, and Phillip Glass, who has long felt a connection to Sufi music – here coming together and evoking a call and response between piano and vocals of the Sufi masters. It is simultaneously the first time Glass collaborates with Smith, and so Harar becomes an extraordinary meeting place for all to celebrate the beauty of Rimbaud’s work.

Referring to the overall work, Smith likens the project to a fourth mind equation. “Because we are working with other people’s work, and not just reading it but channelling these people, they become a fourth mind. We are Rimbaud, you, I, and the work,” Smith says in conversation with Crasneanscki. The unification of all minds together magnifies its power and potential. “It makes me think of Rimbaud’s energy, his strong will,” Smith says. “If we, the living, send out radio and energy waves, the energy of those last poems is still reverberating. It can’t be silenced, because we understand that this work and the artists are not dead, they find life when we are recording them.”

Entitled The Perfect Vision, this musical triptych, which has been co-produced with Leonardo Heiblum and supported by the Analogue Foundation, aims to go beyond 20/20 vision and explore a dimension that exists on a non-physical plane. What one can physically see is only the beginning – this project transcends what we think we see, by multiplying experiences, languages and energies. “We went through places like Mexico, Ethiopia and India to search for a perfect vision, in spaces where you can still feel a sacred presence – where the Gods are still among you,” says Crasneanscki. “In this idea of perfect vision, there is the idea of oneness, and with that comes a sense of supreme love.”

Mummer Love will be released 8th November, to mark the anniversary of the death of Arthur Rimbaud, on 10th November (1891).

credits

released November 8, 2019

license

about

Soundwalk Collective New York, New York

Soundwalk Collective is the contemporary sonic arts platform of founder and artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli. Working with a rotating constellation of artists and musicians, they develop site- and context-specific sound projects through which to examine conceptual, literary or artistic themes, expressing layered narratives that address ideas of memory, time, love and loss. ... more

contact / help

Contact Soundwalk Collective

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Soundwalk Collective, you may also like:

Promises
by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra

supported by 13 fans who also own “Mummer Love with Patti Smith”

hypnotic and incredibly moving marsplutomusic
go to album
Does Spring Hide Its Joy
by Kali Malone (featuring Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton)

supported by 12 fans who also own “Mummer Love with Patti Smith”

music. silence. Gold. Ganondorofu
go to album
Living Torch
by Kali Malone

supported by 12 fans who also own “Mummer Love with Patti Smith”

My heart is beating slower and faster at the same time kwellou
go to album
Interstitial
by Oh No Noh + Jenny Berger Myhre + F.S.Blumm

Free-flowing, loosely structured songs that borrow lightly from jazz and ambient but expand in directions all their own. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 7, 2023
go to album
SAD GODS presents "Singing for Survival - a Compilation for Project Onward"
by Various Artists

A stellar compilation featuring shoegaze and indie favorites like Drowse, Midwife, and Mount Eerie benefitting Project Onward in Chicago. Bandcamp New & Notable May 11, 2023
go to album
Homing
by Liis Ring

These evocative ambient compositions are dotted with quiet vocals & distant field recordings, making them feel like a cave in a deep woods. Bandcamp New & Notable May 1, 2023
go to album
Everywhere at the end of time
by The Caretaker

supported by 11 fans who also own “Mummer Love with Patti Smith”

Actually astounding and emotionally moving, creating a community that I have been proudly a part of for 2 years OrsonXD
go to album