“I’mnot looking for epiphanies…”
PATTI Smith, like most of us, has spent the majority of 2020 sitting still. This state of affairs is anathema to Smith’s peripatetic nature – the arc of travels she has traced so eloquently in her memoirs, Just Kids, M Train, and Year Of The Monkey. “I’m a person who likes to be in motion,” she says, sipping coffee in her downtown Manhattan apartment. “I was slated to do a world tour this year, so I had the mindset to be in performance mode. I still have my little suitcase all packed.”
Smith’s latest album, Peradam is also devoted to travel, albeit a journey of the imagination. The third instalment of her collaborative Perfect Vision trilogy with Soundwalk Collective, Peradam is inspired by the work of a French poet. The two previous records, Mummer Love and The Peyote Dance, took their cues from Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud respectively. The star of the show this time is René Daumal, specifically his 1940s metaphysical-quest novel, Mount Analogue. The LP’s eco-conscious themes recall her last collection of original material Banga’s apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe. Musically, Peradam might be best described as a meditative soundscape, built around field recordings made by intrepid Soundwalk Collective mastermind Stephan Crasneanscki in such far-flung locales as Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, Rishikesh and the Kingdom of Lo, with guest spots from Anoushka Shankar, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Dhan Singh Rana, a seventysomething
Indian Sherpa. The titular “peradam” is a sort of magical crystal, visible only to those who seek it, that Daumal imagined could be found on Mount
Analogue. Or, as Smith puts it, “It’s a small mystical thing you find in the grass when the light hits it. You might completely miss it if your eyes aren’t open.”
is exactly the sort ofand beyond. And while she hints that there may be another Patti Smith album percolating – it’s been nearly eight years since – it’s more likely we’ll be hearing more collaborations with Crasneanscki first. “Everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve ever done on stage or in the studio with my band, comes together with Stephan,” she says. “The way we work, we’re like two detectives with the same evidence, racing to get the clue.
