There’s a new Soundwalk Collective album on the way, titled Death Must Die. 

Soundwalk Collective is a multi-disciplinary audio-visual collective formed of Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi. The collective’s approach to composition combines anthropology, ethnography, non-linear narrative, psycho-geography, the observation of nature, and explorations in recording and synthesis. The source material of their works is always linked to specific locations, natural or artificial, and requires long periods of investigative travel and fieldwork. Their recent projects include a collaboration with Patti Smith and earlier this year reworking the archive of recordings on Jean-Luc Godard’s film set.

Death Must Die is a sound piece that began in 2004 and ended up as a composition for the PS1 radio in NY. The collective will now revise the piece in a “more musical way,” the label, Marionette, explains. 

The piece is based on Crasneanscki’s multiple visits to the sacred Indian city of Varanasi. Determined to capture the city’s elusive reality, Crasneanscki has day by day recorded and re-imagined his understanding of how to perceive the continuously moving stream of the holy Ganga. The composition attempts to emulate the vibration of Kashi that encourages the kind of interiority that enables a person to get a better perspective on reality than one might have, while constantly being in the current of human life.

A photograph shot by Crasneanscki from the great smashan—the great burning ghat of Manikarnika—of a man playing the flute, is printed with a Risograph and included as an insert. Also featured in it are words extracted from the Nasadiya Sukta—also known as the Hymn of Creation, the 129th hymn of the 10th mandala of the Rigveda—that is the ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns concerned with cosmology and the origin of the universe.

Tracklisting

A1. Kingdom of Kashi

A2. Object of Human Pursuit

A3. Garden of Deeds

B1. Tandav

B2. Agni

B3. Hymn of Creation

B4. Shiva Mother Ganges

X1. Hymn of Creation (Alternate Mix)

X2. The Dues of Death

Death Must Die LP will land mid-November.