Album Review: The Peyote Dance by Soundwalk Collective

This found sound collaboration between the experimental collective and a punk rock legend explores the frightening, ambitious and surreal work of French artist Antonin Artaud The New York and Berlin-based avant-garde group S oundwalk Collective specialise in "found" sounds; though perhaps the word "found" is misleading. Far from stumbling across sonic oddities by sheer chance and gluing together a scrapbook of accidents, the collective actively seeks out experimental noises, going to enormous amounts of trouble in the process. And they’ve met their match in punk pioneer Patti Smith.

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In 1936, the celebrated French poet, playwright, and theorist Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico's Sierra Tarahumara to escape the confines of insular bourgeois society, seek out mystical ways of being, and kick an opioid addiction. He found the key to all three quests in peyote. The result of his hallucinogenic journey to the mountains was a 1945 collection of writing called The Peyote Dance, which today reads uncomfortably as a dated account of a European engaging in some drug tourism.

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