Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith: The Peyote Dance review – over-egged mysticism

(Bella Union)
Smith’s incantations over arid music, inspired by a French writer’s take on indigenous people, stray into appropriation

There’s not the slightest cause to doubt that Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli and Patti Smith have made precisely the album they wanted to make, inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud, after a visit to the Rarámuri people of the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico in 1936. Every word in its right place, every piece of instrumental colouration drawn just so. There will be people who will, in good faith, love The Peyote Dance, who will be entranced by Smith’s hallucinatory, incantatory improvisations, and by Soundwalk Collective’s austere, arid musical settings.