Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith today announce the release of ‘Correspondences Vol II’, a new 2-track EP, out March 21st via Bella Union and available to preorder here. To accompany the announcement Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith have shared the first track from the EP titled ‘Children Of Chernobyl’.
On the edge of the forest surrounding Chernobyl, a stone’s throw from the Pripyat River, stands the church of St. Elijah, the only house of worship still operational within the 1000 square-mile radioactive exclusion zone. There, in the courtyard, stands the Bell of Sorrow, which rings just once a year, at exactly 1:23am on April 26th, the moment when human history was forever altered, 39 years ago, as Reactor Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, scattering its deadly, invisible poison throughout the land.
Ten miles northwest, at the centre of the zone, stands a much larger bell-shaped structure, a 31,000-tonne sarcophagus of concrete and steel, tall enough to entomb the Notre-Dame de Paris or the Duomo of Milan. Deep inside it, the nuclear fuel of Reactor Four still burns unstoppably, and will continue to burn for two millennia more, while outside nature thrives in the near total absence of human intervention.
It’s here, where the natural meets the unthinkable, that the story of Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith’s ‘Correspondences’ continues. More than 10 years in the making, the audiovisual project centres on eight pieces initially composed as slow, meditative tracking shots for unmade movies using field recordings painstakingly gathered by Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki on journeys of discovery, inspired as much by the interface of humanity with the natural world as by the lives of the canonical writers, filmmakers and revolutionaries both artists admire.
Presented with these invisible landscapes, Smith improvised and wrote her own spoken-word poetry over the top, often at a distance, allowing the sonic impressions to draw out thoughts and phrases that crystallize into moments of clarity and revelation. “It’s a process of discovery through improvisation and channeling,” she explains. “We are sort of two halves, and we merge together the mental and physical traveller to get the atmosphere and the visual content – the music, even – and the words that will articulate what we want to do.”
“There is a long literary tradition of correspondence,” says Crasneanscki. “Writing was the only way to create proximity across distance. Nowadays, the immediacy of social media abolishes that sort of experience. The longing. That inner ability to channel and reflect, to comment on and share the poetic and sometimes mystical dimensions of travel. Distance allows you to reschedule yourself to what seems new, what is inspiring; it creates conditions for new callings.”
“It sounds abstract, but it creates an atmosphere and almost an earth that I can walk around in my mind,” adds Smith. “I can walk to these places or feel the spirits of these places, because at this point in my life I can’t make difficult journeys. I become the mental traveller. I don’t have to buy a ticket, I don’t have to go to the airport; I just listen and let myself be carried away.”
Released in May 2024, the first two pieces comprising ‘Vol. 1’ explored intimate, multilayered connections between the Greek mythological figure Medea, vengeful daughter of the sun who murdered her own children, and Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed the 1969 movie ‘Medea’ starring opera singer Maria Callas in the title role. Responding to sounds and other material gathered from, among other places, the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, where Medea was supposedly born, and the beach on the outskirts of Rome where Pasolini met his hyper-violent end, Smith articulated beauty and terror alike, both chilling and warm, like fresh blood pooling on sand.
‘Vol. 2’ is similarly conceived, not only as a dialogue between the artists but also between the two sides of the record – ‘Children of Chernobyl’ and ‘The Acolyte, The Artist and Nature’ – a correspondence spanning more than 500 years, from the turbulence of medieval Russia, through the terrible events of 1986, to the ecological crisis of the here and now. But where ‘Vol. 1’ was marked by death, ‘Vol. 2’ is, as Crasneanscki puts it, “more about the sacred, and how we as humans are damaging it.”
‘Correspondences Vol II’ tracklist:
01. Children Of Chernobyl
02. The Acolyte, The Artist and Nature
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith live performances and exhibitions:
April 18th – Correspondences Exhibition – Piknik, Seoul
April 26th – Correspondences Exhibition – Museum of Contemporary Arts – Tokyo
April 29th – ROHM Theatre – Kyoto (performance)
May 3rd – New National Theatre Opera Palace – Tokyo (performance)