[Cover photo of Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith in Lisbon, credit to Rita Carmo]
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith have announced the release of Correspondences Vol II, a new 2-track EP, out March 21, 2025 via Bella Union. 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 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 26, the moment when, 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, where 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 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 gathered by Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki on journeys of discovery.
Presented with these invisible landscapes, Smith improvised and wrote her own spoken-word poetry over the top, often at a distance.
She explains:
It’s a process of discovery through improvisation and channelling. 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.
Smith continues:
It sounds abstract, but it creates an atmosphere and almost an earth that I can walk around in my mind. 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. I 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.”
Vol. II 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. I was marked by death, Vol. II is, as Crasneanscki puts it, “more about the sacred, and how we as humans are damaging it.”
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith live performances + exhibitions:
April 18 – Correspondences Exhibition opens at Piknik, Seoul
April 26 – Correspondences Exhibition opens at Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tokyo
April 29 – ROHM Theatre Kyoto (performance)
May 3 – New National Theatre Opera Palace Tokyo (performance)
