The multidisciplinary art platform Soundwalk Collective has built a successful and intriguing career working with a rotating, diverse collection of artists. Bringing ideas, concepts, and themes to life via sound projects, artist and founder Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli create compositions that resonate deeply with all. They have worked across art installation, dance, music, and film — with creatives such as Patti Smith, Paul B. Preciado, and Abel Ferrara. Through the tangible and spiritual power of sound, they tell stories and explore ideas of memory, time, love, and loss.
One of these key soundscapes comes in the form of a soundtrack for Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. An emotional epic about the artist and activist Nan Goldin’s fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis, it needed a musical score as dynamic as the story itself. Using layered vocals, Nan’s own narration, repetitive lyrics, and instrumentals that transcend time and move across centuries, Soundwalk Collective completely nailed the task. Enchanting, maddening, and above all, powerful, the soundtrack brings Goldin’s personal and political struggles to life.
Soundwalk Collective has performed and exhibited across art shows and stages, from Berghain to Louvre Abu Dhabi to CTM Festival and beyond. We had the pleasure of hearing from them about All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, their process, and what’s next for them.
Listen to the soundtrack…
Read the interview…
Can you explain a bit about how the Soundwalk Collective came to be and what it does?
Soundwalk Collective is a multidisciplinary art platform led by artist and founder Stephan Crasneanscki with the collaboration of producer Simone Merli. Formed in 2000, the Collective focuses on innovative approaches to sound art. Our work revolves around the exploration and reinterpretation of sound in relation to various environments, landscapes, and cultural contexts. We often collaborate with a wide range of artists, including musicians, poets, philosophers, architects, to expand on the exploration of a concept or theme, and incorporate diverse artistic perspectives and into each project. The presence of voice has always been a central element in our work, from both an experimental and narrative perspective, and over the years we established collaborations with wonderful artists such as Patti Smith, Nan Goldin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and more recently Lyra Pramuk, Lucrecia Dalt, Paul B. Preciado, to name a few. There are often constellations of artists and experts from different practices who take part in our projects. The Collective is a sort of breathing organism, continuously reshaping itself and its discipline around experimental sound and contemporary art.
How do you find and select artists to work with?
It mostly happens through research and exploration. In many projects, we conduct extensive research to identify artists who have a specific expertise or understanding of the subject matter. This could involve studying local music traditions, cultural practices, or historical events associated with a particular location, with the intention of seeking out artists whose artistic sensibilities align with the vision and concept of the project, who share a similar aesthetic or conceptual approach to our work and who have a deep appreciation for sound and the space it creates, and a desire to create a diverse and compelling artistic experience that we as humans can resonate with.
But not everything is so planned out. Chance encounters are often the most surprising and giving. Stephan and Patti Smith for example, met randomly on a plane back to New York, 10 years ago. They had an instant connection, and the day after Patti was in our studio downtown Manhattan recording some of the last texts written by Nico, before she died in Ibiza in the Summer of ’88. This was the first step in our long lasting collaboration. Soon after we performed this project together in NYC, London and Berlin and recorded the Killer Road album.
Fast forward 10 years — our collaborative exhibition with Patti, Evidence, was shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris during the past six-months. It was born out of a 5-year process of researches, studies, travels and recordings for the making of three records on Bella Union (The Peyote Dance, Mummer Love, Peradam), which were inspired by the physical and mental journeys of Antonin Artaud in the Sierra Tarahumara, Arthur Rimbaud in Abyssinia, and René Daumal’s ascent of a utopic mountain that materialised for us in the Nanda Devi.
What initially drew you to All The Beauty and the Bloodshed?
Well, it did all start thanks to Nan (Goldin). Stephan and her strangely also met by chance as they were on the same group show some years ago during the Venice Biennale. And every work we have done together since has been extremely touching, allowing us together to explore politically charged and challenging themes. In our first attempt, we worked with texts from David Wojnarowicz, an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art, until his death from AIDS in 1992. He was very close to Nan. A few years later we composed a sound piece for her photographic installation, The Women’s March, 1789, at the Palace of Versailles. We invited nine French inspiring women and powerful voices to interpret The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, written in 1791 by French activist, Olympe de Gouges in response to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. With her “Declaration”, Olympe hoped to expose the failures of the French Revolution in the recognition of gender equality. She was a real pioneer in this discussion. As a result of her political writings she was tried and convicted for treason, executed and beheaded. It is incredible how her story went so much under the radar, and mostly forgotten. So much of her “Declaration” is still so relevant today, although it was written more than 200 years ago. It certainly makes you question a lot of thing. More recently we scored part of Nan’s latest slideshow, Memory Lost, alongside Mica Levi and CJ Calderwood; a poignant reflection on memory and the darkness of addiction.
So when Laura (Poitras) invited us to score All The Beauty… we were just thrilled. Nan’s activism and the work of the advocacy organisation P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) is extremely inspiring, and is a wake-up call to the power of art being able to make change and stop stigma. The story begins with P.A.I.N., the group that Nan founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, de-stigmatise addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to call attention to the toxic philanthropy of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, ignited the opioid epidemic with its blockbuster drug, OxyContin. The film unfolds into an emotional and interconnected story about Nan told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. We were always fiercely inspired by Nan, and admire Laura Poitras’ work incredibly.
What was the process of creating the original score for the film? How did the creative process work?
We had recorded a series of themes and musical ideas following our initial conversations with Laura, and we then took a quite improvisational turn. Through our dear friend Dhanesh Jayaselan, an outstanding curator when it comes to finding incredible voices and musicians, we invited string players and operatic singers in studio, and we played them our recordings into their headphones as we conducted them. Things came quite quickly together, and as we gradually removed the layers of the initial music, what was left was something quite special and very intimate, and with raw power and depth. With the help of Zacharias Falkenberg and Johannes Malfattti we re-scored and arranged the strings and voice recordings into a new notation, and recorded it once again with a full choir of male and female voices, two string quartets and a forty-piece string orchestra for the scenes that required a bigger sound. It is quite surprising where you find yourself once you leave the comfort zone of a creative process and try to find other methods. There is space for creativity every inch of the way and a million ways of doing things. We were so inspired by having found an approach that we strongly resonated with, and everyone involved was so inspired working with this material.
What inspirations or references run through the score?
Upon seeing the film, Stephan freely associated and drew connections with the work and life of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who was removed from society through confinement in institutions. In his last poems, written as fragments, while he was plagued by mental illness, Hölderlin renders nature, in all its fragility and ephemerality. The theme of the fragility of life and creation emerges in Laura’s portrait of Nan and served as inspiration, and was taken up in Hölderlin’s work for the composition of the choral songs and cantus within the soundtrack.
In the first studio sessions we invited Mulay Winter and Youka Snell, two wonderful voice artists and musicians whose practices span through classical, experimental and contemporary music. We started to play with Hölderlin’s words and texts and had them repeated as mantras, trying to find a structure and harmony that was essentially dictated by the syllables and phonetics of the words we chose. Through repetition and layering, and echoing various styles from sacred music to modern minimalism, the lyric scansion became almost like a language possessed, forming cyclical patterns that would overlap multiple times and expand in intensity producing a sort of trance, oscillating between grace and madness.
What emotions or ideas are you hoping to convey through the music?
There is a thin line between the grace and madness in which the artist operates. These lines are constantly fluctuating, it’s almost as they are interchangeable, you can’t fully dissociate the madman from the genius. Antonin Artaud is such a case for example, or Rimbaud and Daumal, or even Nan Goldin’s sister who was so quickly diagnosed as mentally ill or unstable, when maybe she was just hyper empathetic. This grace and madness coexist next to each other, and it is this back and forth between these two stages that influence our musical process. The repetition, the intensity of sound create a vivid experience in which the audience can lose themselves and witness moments of clarity and of “madness”. And then there is the voice. Hearing voices in your head is usually what people describe when referring to madness or schizophrenia, it’s always about voices. We embarked on this idea and chose to approach some of the pieces with only vocal instrumentation in order to illustrate Nan’s story, the story of her sister but also the opioid crisis and really a story of pain. This required a level of sensitivity that could only be expressed through the organic and intimate texture of the voice.
In your opinion, what is the importance of a film score and how does it help bring a film to life?
There is something about the idea of providing identity and memorability: iconic film scores have the ability to become deeply ingrained in popular culture and hold a special place in the audience’s memory. Memorable themes and melodies can become instantly recognisable, evoking strong associations with the film and its characters, even outside the context of the movie itself.
Are there any other projects you are particularly proud of?
Maybe the most recent one. We have just premiered our new collaborative project with Patti Smith, entitled Correspondences, at Rewire Festival in The Hague and Volksbühne in Berlin, earlier this April. The project reflects an ongoing collaboration and conversation between Soundwalk Collective and Patti that has spanned across multiple geographies, uncovering the sonic steps left by poets, film makers, revolutionaries and extraordinary events that have taken place in specific locations.
Stephan has explored remote places all over the world to record and collect extensively in order to establish a sonic grammar that is underpinned by our instrumental experimental compositions. All in the effort to create a musical space for Patti to inhabit with her own poetry and voice. From a collaboration with TBA21–Academy exploring the destructive impact of seismic airguns and human interventions in the oceans, to the resilience of Nature in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, to the decentralised societies envisioned by Peter Kropotkin, to the wastelands of Pasolini’s last night – the pieces presented are an immersive audiovisual journey, almost as a travel to a sonic cinema.
Staging these works after a few years since they were initially recorded in studio gave us the opportunity to revisit their composition and find a new sonic dimension especially for the stage. Much of the original field recordings were recreated live via foley sound practices (breaking of ice blocks, cracking of a car windshield, generating seismic underwater explosions, resonating bells, cracking of cello strings, …) allowing for a physical dimension of sound that speaks directly with the audience in an intimate and powerful way. Patti sets the rhythm and pace of each piece through her words and singing, and all musicians are navigating these novel territories, supporting each other and working the dynamics of the performance live around her voice. It is certainly the most directly communicative expression of our artistic practice, extremely engaging and inspiring for both performers and listeners.
Do you have a career highlight?
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed winning the Golden Lion in Venice and a few months later receiving the Oscar nomination. It is just so inspiring to see how art can foster change, from the removal of the Sackler’s name from such institutions like the Guggenheim or The Met to becoming the first documentary film to win a Golden Lion.
Is there anything you are looking forward to in the near future?
We are staging a series of performances around the score we wrote for All The Beauty And The Bloodshed at a new art space opening in Rome this fall. We’ll be adapting the coral composition for opera singers to perform publicly in the streets of Rome and will curate a program of conversations and talks with philosophers, artists and poets around the themes explored in the film. And very soon in early August we’ll be opening the first exhibition of Correspondences with Patti Smith at the contemporary art museum of Bogotá.