There’s not the slightest cause to doubt that Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli and Patti Smith have made precisely the album they wanted to make, inspired by the writings of Antonin Artaud, after a visit to the Rarámuri people of the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico in 1936. Every word in its right place, every piece of instrumental colouration drawn just so. There will be people who will, in good faith, love The Peyote Dance, who will be entranced by Smith’s hallucinatory, incantatory improvisations, and by Soundwalk Collective’s austere, arid musical settings.
And there will be others – perhaps we’re just shallow; I don’t doubt the possibility – who listen to it and hear only a stream of addled mysticism accompanied by scrapings and whistlings, despite it being played on Rarámuri instruments, and the principals having gathered debris from a cave in which Antonin lived to “awaken the landscape’s sleeping memories”.
It doesn’t take long to realise what’s in store. After an opening track narrated by Gael García Bernal, Smith begins her first improvisation, Indian Culture, in which she ponders “urinary camphor from the bulge of a dead vagina” and observes that “daddy-mommy no longer buggers the innate pederast”. Well, quite. There’s death and naked figures on horseback, bones enough to keep a dog shelter happy, and barely a hint of melody. There’s also the other, shadowy issue: here’s an album made by white people about a white man’s cultural tour of another way of living. The actual Rarámuri people are so much colour. But, damn, they have great peyote.
