The Peyote Dance by Patti Smith (review)

The Peyote Dance, an album set mostly to the late poetry of Antonin Artaud, is Patti Smith's second collaboration with Soundwalk Collective, a New York–based experimental sound outfit, and third altogether. They first worked together on the 2016 album Killer Road, and since The Peyote Dance was released on 31 May 2019, they published another album, Mummer Love (November 2019), in which they explore the work of another French poet whom Smith admires: Arthur Rimbaud. The latter poet has loomed large in Smith's work since her early days as the leading poetess of New York's punk rock scene. In retrospect, Artaud can be found looming in the corners of her poetry, gradually entering her music performances (she did a concert dedicated to him during the exhibit of his works of paper at MoMA in 1996). In Peyote Dance her fascination with Artaud finally comes into full display.

Stephan Crasneanscki, who—together with Simone Merli—is the principal member of Soundwalk Collective, traveled to Sierra Tarahumara to record onsite, using the instruments that the local Rarámuri make for their own purposes. Smith's sections were added later: "Listening, reading and improvising to the tracks in the New York studio allowed Smith to channel Artaud's spirit" (Soundwalk Collective 2020). Apart from the opening track, "Una Nota Sobre el Peyote" (A note on peyote), read by acclaimed Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, the album features Artaud's poems "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun" and "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Night," "The New Revelations of Being," "Alienation and Black Magic," "Basalówala Aminá Ralámuli Paísila," as well as Smith's original song "Ivry," named after the clinic near Paris where Artaud spent his last months after being released from Rodez mental hospital in May 1946.

Artaud sailed to Mexico in January 1936. During his stay there, he undertook a perilous journey by train and on horseback to Sierra Tarahumara, where the Rarámuri people lived in relative isolation for centuries. A long-time user of opium and heroin—prescribed for medical purposes early in the century—Artaud went through withdrawal, which made his journey through rugged terrain even more difficult. His goal was to take part in the peyote ritual, which the local villagers still practiced despite centuries of attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to prohibit indigenous religious practices. Upon his return, he wrote that the local villagers "are living in the style that predates the Flood" ([1947] 1976a:3). That is no longer the case. In the late 1980s, a road was cut all the way up to the high plateau of Sierra Tarahumara, and with it came the loggers who cut the ancient pine trees, and the drug cartels who brought violence and made this "ancient race" their vassals.¹

"Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun" comes from Artaud's long poem To Have Done with the Judgement of God, which he recorded for the French radio in November 1947, only months before he died (4 March 1948) of undiagnosed rectal cancer. With this and other recordings he created in the months leading up to this death, Artaud made a lasting mark on sound and radio art. The Peyote Dance is not an attempt to emulate or expand on Artaud's inimitable vocal gestures. Instead, Smith's recitation of his verses is composed, clear, and devoid of any excesses. She resists the impulse to read eruptions of glossolalia in his poetry as textual screams. To great effect and even clinical accuracy, in the finale of "Alienation and Black Magic," she delivers his word jumble in a barely audible whisper, as an incantation aimed primarily to oneself.

Soundwalk Collective creates a landscape of sounds that Artaud might have heard during his stay in the village of Norogachi: the howling of the wind, crackling of leaves and branches, swooshing of rattles, beat of the drums, creaky strings, and noises that seem to resemble the...