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Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith share video to new track “Knowledge Of The Self” – New album “Peradam” released 4th September via Bella Union

August 2, 2020
(Soundwalk Collective photo by Vanina Sorrenti / Patti Smith photo by Jesse Paris Smith)

Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith share video to new track “Knowledge Of The Self”

With their new album Peradam due for release 4th September via Bella Union, Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith have shared a video to the track “Knowledge Of The Self.” Of the track, which features Anoushka Shankar on sitar, Patti Smith says: “We have to, in order to be free of all of the things that we are attached to, even ideas of ourselves, or masks that we put on or Band-Aid’s upon our transgressions, in order to achieve this freedom, we have to peel away everything, every defence we have, every defence that we put up for ourselves. I think that Daumal is directing us to do this but in a benevolent way, although there is no way to protect anyone from the pain of enlightenment, you have to grope about, and you have to strip down.” The video, which features editing and visual collage by Anastasia Ivanova is streaming below:

Peradam takes as its entry point René Daumal’s early 1940s novel Mount Analogue: a Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, in which the French writer, critic and poet mapped a metaphysical journey to “the ultimate symbolic mountain” in search of meaning. In it, Daumal introduced the idea of the “peradam”, a rare, crystalline stone – harbouring profound truths – that is only visible to seekers on a true spiritual path.  

Peradam arrives as “the final stone”, says Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki, in The Perfect Vision, a triptych of albums that evoke and explore the sainted spaces of thought and creativity opened by the three French writers and poets. After albums devoted to Antonin Artaud (The Peyote Dance) and Arthur Rimbaud (Mummer Love), Peradam expands on “the living space”, says Smith, that Daumal left for future seekers to enter and create out of. 

Daumal’s spiritual quests ranged wide and deep. Part-influenced by Rimbaud, he also identified with the Pataphysicians, followers of the avant-garde absurdist Alfred Jarry. Daumal experimented with hallucinogens to the detriment of his health, though he would later transfer his passions to the purity of work as he nurtured a fascination with Hindu philosophies and taught himself Sanskrit; Peradam features some of his translations. While Daumal embraced the idea of self-abnegation as the key to internal awakening, he was also drawn to the syntheses of Eastern/Western thought in Greek-Armenian philosopher GI Gurdjieff’s teachings. Daumal’s greatest works include the novels A Night of Serious Drinking and Mount Analogue, which – though unfinished at the time of his death from TB at 36 in 1944 – inspired psychedelic magus Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain as well as the creative journeys undertaken by Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith.

1. Nanda Devi

2. Peradam (featuring Tenzin Choegyal)

3. Knowledge Of The Self (featuring Anoushka Shankar)

4. Dawn in Rishikesh

5. Spiritual Death (featuring Tenzin Choegyal)

6. The Four Cardinal Times (featuring Charlotte Gainsbourg)

7. Hymn To The Liquid

8. Vera

9. The Rat (featuring Tenzin Choegyal)

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