The Sound­walk Col­lec­tive has made music art out of found sounds since 2004. They record­ed 2012’s Medea while tra­vers­ing the Black Sea and fish­ing for sounds using a scan­ner and high pow­ered aer­i­al anten­nas; 2014’s Last Beat used con­tact micro­phones on the archi­tec­ture of a music club to col­lect vibra­tions instead of music; 2017’s Before Music There Is Blood col­laged deep echo­ing record­ings of clas­si­cal music played in var­i­ous halls. This time, in their upcom­ing The Pey­ote Dance, they have brought in poet and rock god­dess Pat­ti Smith for a trip into Mex­i­co.

The above track “The New Rev­e­la­tions of Being” is a pre­view of what’s to come. The album title comes from a book by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde the­ater direc­tor and author, who trav­eled to Mex­i­co to explore rev­e­la­to­ry visions with the Rará­muri peo­ple in 1936. Artaud was hop­ing that pey­ote would shake his opi­oid addic­tion. When he lat­er returned to France, Artaud stayed and remained in an insane asy­lum, receiv­ing elec­tric shock ther­a­py. His time with the Rará­muri stayed a touch­stone of hap­pi­ness dur­ing his dark­est days.

With a shared belief that trav­el expands the mind, the Sound­walk Col­lec­tive trav­eled to the same Sier­ra Tarahu­marar region of Mex­i­co as Artaud, vis­it­ed the same places he stayed, and indeed also took pey­ote. They record­ed instru­ments and sound­scapes, and then back in the States, Pat­ti Smith wrote and record­ed poems based on Artaud’s book, his oth­er works, and her own respons­es to the sound fields.

“The poets enter the blood­stream, they enter the cells. For a moment, one is Artaud,” Smith said about the record­ing. “You can’t ask for it, you can’t buy it, you can’t take drugs for it to be authen­tic. It just has to hap­pen, you have to be cho­sen as well as choose.”

The album is the first in a tril­o­gy with Smith about poets and trav­el. The oth­er two albums will be based on works and jour­neys by Arthur Rim­baud and René Dau­mal, and fea­ture sounds record­ed at the Abyssin­ian val­ley of Ethiopia and the Himalayan Sum­mit of India respec­tive­ly.

This not the first time the group has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Pat­ti Smith. In 2016, they released Killer Road a trib­ute to Nico and her final days on the island of Ibiza, where the singer plunged to her death on a bicy­cle ride. The album also fea­tured vocals by Smith’s daugh­ter Jessie Paris Smith.

Sound­walk Col­lec­tive mem­ber Stephan Cras­nean­sc­ki first met Pat­ti Smith, fit­ting­ly, at an air­port in Paris, as the two were return­ing from sep­a­rate artis­tic trav­els: Cras­nean­sc­ki from East­ern Europe and Rus­sia, Smith from French Guiana and Tang­iers.

The Pey­ote Dance will be released May 31 on Bel­la Union.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith’s Award-Win­ning Mem­oir, Just Kids, Now Avail­able in a New Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion
Hear Antonin Artaud’s Cen­sored, Nev­er-Aired Radio Play: To Have Done With The Judg­ment of God (1947)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Music and LSD: after “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” and Sgt. Pep­per, we knew what an acid trip should sound like. Oth­er folks need­ed to know more. Some­where in Los Ange­les in 1966 a group of musi­cians were dos­ing and record­ing while trip­ping.

The result­ing recording–credited to “Under­ground 12” and con­sid­ered the ear­li­est known case of musi­cians record­ing while under the influ­ence of LSD–was only avail­able, as the leg­end goes, by mail order–you can see a copy of it here on discogs, a plain red label with only an address: 12457 Ven­tu­ra Blvd. in Stu­dio City, CA. A lit­tle bit of Google snoop­ing revealed this to be an office for Hunt­ing­ton Park First Sav­ings and Loan in 1966, but assum­ing there was anoth­er office there, an issue of Bill­board from that year also men­tions an artist man­ag­er called Bob Reed at the same address. (Bob, we’re on to you!).

There’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly groovy about this music. There’s no sitars, no fuzz ped­als, no incense, no pep­per­mints. There is, how­ev­er, a lot of echo and delay, a lot of sped up tape (which in parts sounds a bit like Zappa’s “King Kong”), plen­ty of aton­al laugh­ing, and welp, that’s about it for side one.

Side two is a bit bet­ter, with an actu­al piano played at nor­mal speed, and an elec­tric gui­tar solo­ing against it. This sounds a bit prog­gy, about five years ahead of its time. But then the pro­duc­er (Bob Reed, is that you again?) starts speed­ing up the tape again.

Con job or bad trip? Did these musi­cians know what they were in for? Did they real­ly dose, or was stu­dio trick­ery seen as a good enough place­bo? Did the LSD pro­duce some pret­ty ordi­nary stu­dio jam­ming and the LP is a sal­vage job? So many mys­ter­ies, so lit­tle time.

Lyser­gia, a Swedish label that re-releas­es rare grooves such as this has also put out The Psy­che­del­ic Expe­ri­ence: The Ulti­mate Jour­ney Through Late 60s Psy­che­delia, Acid Burns and Drug­gy Grooves by Patrick Lund­borg, a Swedish writer whose sub­ject was LSD, and rere­leased the only album by Madri­gal, a Mor­ris­town, New Jer­sey two­some which has a 13-minute track called “Stoned Freak­out.”

How­ev­er if the above sam­pler thrills you and you would like to own an orig­i­nal copy of this dubi­ous clas­sic by the Under­ground 12, it will set you back $666. The sell­er, obvi­ous­ly, knows what’s up.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip Which Took Place on April 19, 1943

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

When did punk rock die? Every­one knows it hap­pened some­time in recent his­to­ry, but few peo­ple agree on when. The music still exists, in know­ing quo­ta­tion marks, but its win­ning com­bi­na­tion of unforced abra­sive­ness and cal­cu­lat­ed offen­sive­ness seems to have dis­ap­peared. Maybe pick a year at ran­dom; say, 2010, the year the last great punk song­writer, Jay Reatard, died. It also hap­pens to be the year the last great punk band, OFF!, formed, but they’re a super­group of clas­sic punk musi­cians.

One could push that date back into any decade and make rea­soned argu­ments. One snarling purist even once wrote that punk died in 1977 when the Clash signed to CBS. Maybe he was on to some­thing. The fol­low­ing year, it was post-punk, with John­ny Rot­ten, aka Lydon, releas­ing his post-Sex Pistol’s project Pub­lic Image Limited’s first album, First Issue. Also in 1978, Siouxsie and the Ban­shees released their debut album, a state­ment for the spik­i­ness and melo­dra­ma of post punk if there ever was one.

By 1981, a year some­one might also choose to etch on punk’s tomb­stone, sur­viv­ing mem­bers of post-punk dar­lings Joy Divi­sion had reformed into New Order and released their first album, Move­ment. Declar­ing the death of punk sounds like a bum­mer, but many peo­ple found solace in the arms of new wave syn­th­pop and acid house. Still, 1981 didn’t care about anyone’s punk opin­ions. A slew of now-clas­sic punk and hard­core albums coex­ist­ed with the likes of Gary Numan—Black Flag’s Dam­aged and D.O.A.’s Hard­core ’81, clas­sic albums from Crass, The Adicts, Ado­les­cents, T.S.O.L., and, of course, The Exploited’s Punk’s Not Dead.

The list above (view it in a larg­er for­mat here), the “All-Time Punk Top 100”—voted on in 1981 by read­ers of the “music paper” Sounds—con­tains a hand­ful of songs from Siouxsie and the Ban­shees and Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed. Some peo­ple might choose to split hairs. The Exploit­ed make many appear­ances, as do the Sex Pis­tols, The Clash, UK Subs, Dis­charge and oth­er British stal­warts. The heavy UK lean is to be expect­ed from read­ers of the short-lived UK music mag, but the fact that there are no Ramones, no Dead Boys, no Stooges, no Blondie, no Black Flag even… can begin to feel down­right insult­ing.

Maybe punk just looked dif­fer­ent on the oth­er side of the pond in 1981. If it looked like the all-time top 100 list, then it sound­ed like the playlist above (stream it on Spo­ti­fy here), which col­lects these 100 best-ofs, or greats, or not so greats, or clear­ly mis­guid­ed choic­es, or what­ev­er. Enjoy it as you furi­ous­ly cor­rect it with your own picks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Hear the 50 Best Post-Punk Albums of All Time: A Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Playlist Curat­ed by Paste Mag­a­zine

Stream a Playlist of 68 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness