That Eric Alper

Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith today announce the release of Correspondences Vol II, a new 2-track EP, out March 21 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”. Click HERE to listen.

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 26, 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 crystallise into moments of clarity and revelation. “It’s a process of discovery through improvisation and channelling,” 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. 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. 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. 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.”

“Having worked with Patti for over 10 years now, I often use the metaphor of Rembrandt’s late paintings when we talk about her poetry,” says Crasneanscki. “There’s a deep blackness to it; a lot of gravitas, a lot of darkness. But it also has these beautiful gold highlights and clair-obscur. It reflects the transition of the world we are living in, and the feeling that there’s a new reality that’s setting in, and the realisation of what we’re leaving behind. There’s a lot of grieving in it, and a lot of longing too.”

Grief and darkness are palpable too in “Children of Chernobyl”, slowly clouding over like a gathering storm as the lush textures of a languid morning – birdsong, gentle rain, a distant bell – transform into a vision of the glowing, walking dead. Smith sings here too, in a fractured, wavering voice against a backdrop of Geiger counter noises and eerie, mutated notes played on the decaying pianos of abandoned Pripyat, once home to the most prestigious music schools in the former Soviet Union. More ghostly still are the same words sung in Ukrainian at the song’s end by the Chernobyl Children’s Choir: “There are roses underfoot that one cannot smell / There is fruit on the vine that one cannot eat / And they went to bed hungry / And hungry they’ll sleep / For a thousand years.”

For Crasneanscki, who has Ukrainian roots on his father’s side, the two pieces are intertwined not only with their Slavic past but also with issues that resonate today, not least with the ongoing Russian aggression. Only last month, a military rocket struck the bell-shaped dome at Chernobyl, penetrating almost to the substructure. Is containment then just an illusion? At a time when both nothing and everything is sacred, where do we turn? The struggle of humanity to sit with its powerful urge to create, while also being reckless and destructive, is something Crasneanscki sees playing out again with AI. “As humans, we put in place these systems, these structures, that we don’t know how to control when suddenly something goes wrong,” he cautions. “Which it always does, at some point.”

With CORRESPONDENCES Vol. II, Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith continue to meditate on great darkness and great hope, calling and responding to each other across distance, textures and time. “What I like about field recording is that often it’s creating a bridge with the distant past, with people many generations before me who might have experienced almost the exact same moment of sound,” says Crasneanscki. Like Rublev at the monastery, crossing the snowbound courtyard, or walking through the forest at Chernobyl, with the wind in the trees, raindrops falling on leaves, and the distant flowing river. A bell ringing down through the years. “It’s changed my life,” says Smith. “So, I’m grateful.”

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)

Correspondences Vol II tracklist and artwork below:

1. Children Of Chernobyl

2. The Acolyte, The Artist and Nature