Non Exclsuive Title!

Format: LP, 300 copies. 180g audiophile vinyl with extensive book. Comes with Obi.


Tracklist:

a1. Kingdom of Lo 12:34

b1. Chasing the Demon 12:50

While they’ve been active for more than two decades, it’s only been in
recent years that the Berlin and New York based contemporary sonic arts
platform, Soundwalk Collective, has begun to gather the accolades and
attention that they rightfully deserve. Firmly rooted within a
multi-disciplinary practice that engages the narrative potential of
sound within the contexts of visual art, dance, music and film, as well
as tapping anthropological, ethnographic, and psycho-geographic
research, they’ve gained great note for collaborations with Jean-Luc
Goddard, Nan Goldin, Sasha Waltz, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and numerous others.

Building on the back of 2023’s brilliant “All the Beauty and the
Bloodshed”, Soundwalk Collective now returns with “Khandroma”, one of
their most fascinating and singular endeavours to date, which re-engages
their enduring creative partnerships with Patti Smith. Issued by Ubi Ku,
a brand new imprint founded by the Italian Buddhist Union dedicated to
the relationships between Buddhist cultures, music, and sound, across
the album’s stunning two sides this incredible ensemble draws
inspiration from and conjures Tibetan deities, the Himalayan Plateau,
the valleys of Nepal and the highest peaks where the most ancient
Buddhist temples reside, culminating as a sprawling sonic tapestry like
little else. Issued as a beautifully produced, limited edition vinyl LP
and CD, mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, complete with a booklet
featuring liner note essays penned by Chiara Bellini and Filippo
Lunardo, and images by Stephan Crasneanscki, it’s hands down among our
favourite releases by Soundwalk Collective to date and not to be missed!

An international experimental sound art collective founded in 2001 by
the artists Stephan Crasneanscki, who was joined in 2008 by producer
Simone Merli, Soundwalk Collective is a contemporary sonic arts
platform, featuring a rotating constellation of artists and musicians,
that, in vastly varied number of ways, has continuously explored the
remarkable potential of sound within the contexts of visual art, dance,
music and film, offering particular emphasis to anthropological,
ethnographic, and psycho-geographic research, examining conceptual,
literary or artistic themes. In addition to their many collaborations
and accolades that attend to an increased ambitious catalog of releases,
they scored Laura Poitras’ film, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”,
which won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, as well
performed and exhibited at Berghain, CTM Festival, documenta, Manifesta,
New Museum, and Centre Pompidou, where they notably opened “Evidence”, a
exhibition with Patti Smith comprising an audio-visual journey from the
work of French poets Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud and René Daumal.
While Soundwalk Collective’s output and use of sonority - sometimes
original composition and others manipulated archival recordings - and
context is varied, the project’s endeavours are unified by a focus on
sound as material that is both tactile and poetic, pursuing layered
narratives that address ideas of memory, time, love and loss. Their
latest, “Khandroma”, enlisting Patti Smith’s contribution on one of its
tracks, stands among the most exciting and rich of these explorations yet.

Perhaps the best way of approaching “Khandroma” is through Soundwalk
Collective’s longstanding focus on the discipline of psycho-geography -
a practice that interrogates the impact of an environment’s embedded
histories and meanings on the psychology of the present - as well as the
group’s integration of observations of nature, and uses of non-linear
narrative, as a vehicle for recording and the synthesis of meaning. Like
previous projects that have encountered them traveling extensively
across the world, occupying diverse environments for long periods of
investigation and fieldwork, during which they source materials for
subsequent works, the material roots of “Khandroma” are a body of field
recordings made by Crasneanscki, Francisco López, and Merli at altitudes
between 2,760 and 4,500 meters, in varying locations across Upper
Mustang during 2016.

Drawing the album’s title from the Tibetan feminine deity who reigns the
skies, the album’s two compositions weave a stunning sonic tapestry from
collaged sounds of nature, bells, drones, unplaceable tones and vocals,
and in the case of its second piece, “Chasing the Demon”, the voice of
Patti Smith, culminating as a deeply emotive and imagistic expanse that
taps something far more profound than any of its single parts. As the
collective states: “the album traces the continuous morphing of the wind
into sound expressions. The Himalayan Plateau seems designed to amplify
and echo the encounter of the breaths, the prayers, and the chants
emerging from around and within those temples; amid the sounding of
bells, the turning of prayer wheels, and the billowing of flags. A
resonant musical body that we recorded so as to capture its boundless
mutations; an unstoppable force that cries, whispers, and blows through
and over stones, wood, empty halls and monastic robes, etching an
ever-changing sonic landscape onto the surfaces it encounters.”

Immersive, stunningly beautiful, and haunting, “Khandroma” draws the
ancient and distant into the consciousness of the present, close to
home, bordering on the profound. Issued by Ubi Ku as a beautifully
produced, limited edition vinyl LP and CD, mixed and mastered by
Giuseppe Ielasi, complete with a booklet featuring liner note essays
penned by Chiara Bellini and Filippo Lunardo, and images by Stephan
Crasneanscki, we can’t recommend it enough.

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: gpsr@wordandsound.netMore