BELLA958 // 8 November 2019

A sonic cross-continental experience, Mummer Love is the second album in the Perfect Vision triptych collaboration between Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith. For this body of work, Soundwalk Collective journeyed to Africa to explore the intricacies of Arthur Rimbaud’s most obscure period. After leaving France and what he deemed the ‘western stagnation’, Rimbaud found himself in Harar, Ethiopia – an epicenter of Sufism in Africa. Sufi practise focuses on the renunciation of worldly things, the purification of the soul and the mystical contemplation of God’s nature. A strand within the wider Islam religion, it focuses on spirituality, meditation and chanting sessions. Sufi music is about reaching a communal ecstatic state, and once you find yourself there, you are granted access to the unknown. Stephan Crasneanscki from Soundwalk Collective spent time with the Sufi masters in Harar to record their music and chants in the shrine, of which he says: “You obtain connections to other levels of yourself and consciousness. This connection, like poetry, is a universal language. A language of the soul, for the soul.”