Bleep

Some artists succeed in achieving a kind of immortality, even if they don’t intend to. Upon visiting the University of Mexico to deliver lectures in 1936, French dramatist and provocateur Antonin Artaud spent his time outside the lecture theatre travelling. He left Mexico City for the Chihuahua region, and with the help of a mestizo guide, sought to find a peyote shaman with the power to heal him of an opioid addiction. His experiences were documented in The Peyote Dance. In turn, the book inspired Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith to conceive this mesmeric eponymous album, a vast hallucinogenic landscape of transcendental oneness, raspy with Smith’s vintage punk energy.