BELLA1618 // 21 March 2025

CORRESPONDENCES is an ever-evolving project between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith. Spanning over 10 years, it traverses a wealth of geographies and their natural environments, where the artists have uncovered sonic footsteps left by poets, filmmakers, revolutionaries, and the impact of climate change. Soundwalk Collective’s founder, Stephan Crasneanscki, has explored, captured and collected the world’s remotest places in sound to awaken a sonic memory within the landscape, uncovering traces of past and current histories of the world we are living in. The resulting compositions are made of sound that reflect our relation to this world, the environment, the soul of our existence, and the creative process of the artist.

With CORRESPONDENCES Vol. II, Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith continue to meditate on great darkness and great hope, calling and responding to each other across distance, textures and time. “What I like about field recording is that often it’s creating a bridge with the distant past, with people many generations before me who might have experienced almost the exact same moment of sound,” says Crasneanscki. Like Rublev at the monastery, crossing the snowbound courtyard, or walking through the forest at Chernobyl, with the wind in the trees, raindrops falling on leaves, and the distant flowing river. A bell ringing down through the years. “It’s changed my life,” says Smith. “So, I’m grateful.”