To the uninitiated, Sufi mysticism can seem vaguely new age-y. It’s a misguided but not unreasonable thought—like voguish strains of body healing therapy, meditation, or most dance music, its raison d'être is that of psychic obliteration. Arch and ascetic, the Sufi aims to dropkick their consciousness into a state of dizzy ecstasy in the name of reaching God’s warm, annihilating glow.
The methods of getting there, however, are myriad, and passageways steeply sloped. The Sufi tradition— various as it may be—believes that man is the middle slice in a Venn diagram that junctures divine command and divine creation, and access to either side of the model is earned through sweaty rite. A famous faction of Istanbuli Sufis whirl while chanting, reaching somatic exhaustion by exhaling Quaranic verses as they spin in white linen skirts and tall hats—which, en masse and from a distance, appears like a human-scale vision of whipped meringue—whereas some Syrian, Iraqi, and Ethiopian divisions pray and recite passages for marathon hours to reach what in Arabic is referred to as a state of tawajjuh, or “orientation.” A meeting with the limits of a mind is the only path to egoic liquidation; worthiness, in other words, granted through discipline and self-erasure, is the key to becoming one with something greater.
A troupe known as Soundwalk Collective has explored a version of this idea since their conception in 2000. Over the past nineteen years, their belief in the primacy of raw, unmediated connection to a higher source has led them to a series of magpie collaborations in pursuit of the unknowable. There have been elegant payoffs in the past, some more tasteful than others. Now, they’ve assembled a colossus—Philip Glass, a titan of minimalism; Mulatu Astatke, creator of the term ‘Ethio-jazz,’; Patti Smith, polymathic punk ad-libber; and the Sufi group of Sheikh Ibrahim, whose muscular voices suggest the love of God incarnate. Together, they’ve produced Mummer Love, a large, baroque gesture toward the act of what it means to purposefully lose oneself.
The second in a triptych the Soundwalk team has termed “Perfect Vision,” Mummer Love summons the usual Sufistic tropes of memory, imagination, hallucination, and desire via incantatory repetition. Recorded onsite in the holy city of Harar, Ethiopia—an epicenter of Sufism in Africa—the field recordings and ambient pickups bear the faint whiff of travelers visiting a foreign place in active quest of truths not found in the usual metropolitan studio.
This is not necessarily a bad quality. It’s easy to be caught in the spirit of the squad’s spiral toward rapture. The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud—whose work scans “Oriental Sufi” in spirit—serves as a conduit for their explorations. Rimbaud’s relationship to what he referred to as his “beloved Harar,” and the traces he left there, refract through the voice of Patti Smith, who riffs hard with his words as source text and prayer.
At times, it feels as if control is ceded entirely to Smith. Like the title of her praise poem to the poet, the track at the core of the work, and the source of the album’s namesake, the record is a genuinely tender performance of “Mummer Love.” (Mummering, per an old Newfoundlandian tradition, is a wintertime custom that involves participants dressing in disguise, visiting neighboring villages, and imploring strangers to guess their identities.) For decades, Smith has been a perma-mummer of Rimbaud’s, taking elements of his literary and physical corpus—the wide, lambent eyes, the haystack hair, the love of a bestial turn of phrase —and inhabiting them all like a comfortably cut suit.
The throughline between them here is direct, and the fit perfect. These are expressions of the same Smith who, early on, traded her muse in Bob Dylan for the French enfant terrible (and, lest one forgets, the title of her indelible “Piss Factory” is an oblique paean to the poet after she earned a swirly for reading a copy of his first collection, Illuminations, on the shift at work); the very Smith who still finds ways to incorporate urine, her favorite abject fascination, as a connective to the man she calls her sage (in the title track: “I will piss in the urinal you pissed in, a young man cursing existence, [...] piss and tears and urine”); the exact Smith whose eccentricities are always controlled, whose metaphors remain clipped and brutish, whose voice still sounds like the tumbling of stone and soil. (Her, again, on rain: “the piss of the angels.”)
Smith’s gleam also highlights, perhaps unintentionally, the detachment within the team, who operate less as one, and more like distinct actors in a multi-act theatre performance. The wild pile-up in, say, “Bad Blood,” breeds chaos, not singularity: identifiably, there’s Glass, the Sufi troupe, Astatke’s touch, Smith’s voice, but they never truly merge, only exist in parallel. In some moments, the super-groupy nature of the entire outfit feels precisely like what it is: the sum of its parts. It frankly works best when the Sufi team stand on their own—take the hugely reverential “Aw Abadir”—but there is something of the plurality within the all-hands performances that feels like ideas swarming, not swimming.
An oft-used metaphor in Sufi poetry is one of a raindrop falling into the ocean as an accurate portrait of proper submission to God: once the drop joins water, it cedes its identity as droplet and becomes annihilated into the sea. The mystic’s goal is to surrender the “I,” and instead become one with divine glory. The “I”— or, rather, Smith’s “I,” Collective’s “I”—throughout “Mummer Love” never fully submerges, but remains afloat. Despite the earnestness of their chase for transcendence, it remains a chase. They are too there to dispossess themselves of themselves; too present to yield to something bigger.
There are glimmers of this idea, though. “La Maison de Rimbaud” is perhaps the most consummate attempt at spiritual capitulation, as recordings of the adhan (the Islamic call to prayer) bubble alongside Philip Glass on the keys, quiet, airy and sacred. There are sparrows, footfalls, murmurings, ambient chatter, hallucinations of Harar at dusk. “Suddenly,” as Rimbaud may have put it, “dyeing the blueness, delirium, were slow rhythms under the streaking of daylight.”
