Song Of The Highest Tower: A Brief Review Of The New Album From Soundwalk Collective With Patti Smith

The newest collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith is exactly the sort of release I'd have wanted to hear when I was 19, and first discovering the first four releases from Patti Smith. I was also reading a lot of Rimbaud at the time too, thanks to some reference made by Van Morrison, I think, which set me on that path. So you will not get an impartial review from me, given how very much Patti and Rimbaud meant to me as a young man. To hear his poetry and writings interpreted by Patti and Soundwalk Collective on a record that is so spiritual (in the realest sense of that word), is a rich experience. Mummer Love, out today via Bella Union, is sublime and illuminating.

"Eternity" courses with elements of Sufi music, and it is one of many pieces here that transports a listener to the Africa of Rimbaud's Illuminations. That track, and the roiling "Song of the Highest Tower", find Patti Smith reciting Rimbaud's words as the music threatens to carry one away. This is sensual stuff, and it's also devoutly agnostic, the sounds of a spiritual traveler being lost in a wilderness both literal and figurative. As the cuts progress, and as Rimbaud's words are being brought to life, we think of his line about a "great unraveling of the senses", and one hears Patti Smith sound genuinely transgressive again. To say that is not to disparage her recent recordings but, rather, to highlight just how much the Patti Smith here on Mummer Love sounds like the Patti Smith of Radio Ethiopia (1976).

The title track here is a composition by Patti to Rimbaud, and it sits nicely next to more faithful material, like the percussive and throbbing "Farewell", where the words being recited are every bit as important as the drum-rolls. And if "Bad Blood" succeeds as world music, it is the closer "Sensation" that remains the perfect blend of Rimbaud's timeless words, the music of Soundwalk Collective, and setting of the production and presentation. This is the rarest of records, like a great jazz album from the Sixties, that seems to be Art of the highest order, and the kind of thing that actually inspires, and invigorates with reminders of just how transfiguring the process of artistic creation can be.

Mummer Love it out today Bella Union.

More details on Soundwalk Collective via the official Facebook page.

[Photo: Bella Union]