Mummer Love
Mummer Love is the latest Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith collaboration to take the romantic ideal of the wandering poet as its starting point. 2016’s Killer Road and this year’s The Peyote Dance assumed the psyches of Nico and Antonin Artaud respectively, reworking their poetry against field recordings made in the far-flung locations of their searches for spiritual freedom. Mummer Love’s subject is Arthur Rimbaud, whose teen angst poetry is presented in the context of an underreported later period in his life, when he had given up poetry to become a merchant in Ethiopia.
(Wire magazine)
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith - Mummer Love
Mummer Love is a continuation of Patti Smith’s lifelong fascination with Rimbaud, a seam that runs through her work in poetry, music and memoir, as well as her personal aesthetic. The title track is the only original Smith lyric here, a direct address to her object of fascination (“I have pulled into your town/I walk the streets that you despised”) but otherwise Smith interprets Rimbaud’s words through half-sung incantation.
(Wire magazine)
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith - Mummer Love
Click to viewMummer Love is a continuation of Patti Smith’s lifelong fascination with Rimbaud, a seam that runs through her work in poetry, music and memoir, as well as her personal aesthetic. The title track is the only original Smith lyric here, a direct address to her object of fascination (“I have pulled into your town/I walk the streets that you despised”) but otherwise Smith interprets Rimbaud’s words through half-sung incantation.