Soundwalk Collective – All The Beauty and The Bloodshed soundtrack track by track
Film is about activist and photographer Nan Goldin
Soundwalk Collective is a “contemporary sonic arts platform” founded by artist Stephan Crasneanscki, working with producer Simone Merli. They work with a rotating roster of collaboators to develop site and context-specific sound projects – but they’ve also put shedloads of great albums out too.
They’ve exhibited everywhere from the Louvre to Berghain and among the list of eminent co-conspirators they’ve worked with are musician Patti Smith, legendary film director Jean-Luc Goddard, photographer Nan Goldin, choreographer Sasha Waltz and actor and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Their soundtrack to the 2022 film All The Beauty and the Bloodshed – a film about photographer and activist Nan Goldin and her battle with pharma giants the Sackler family over the US opioid crisis which has claimed more than 600,000 lives – is about to hit our shelves, so we thought we’d get the pair to talk us through the soundtrack.
- Half Of Life
This first piece is inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s moving poem ‘Half Of Life’, which was published in 1805, shortly before the onset of his own mental destruction. In the first strophe a painterly vision of summer is interrupted by a blank line half-way through the poem. From the severing space emerges the lamenting subject, while the visual imagery in the first strophe turns acoustic in the second. As it turned out, the poem was written nearly halfway through his life. The music here is composed solely with the soprano voices of Mulay Winter and Youka Snell, loosely recalling the falsetto sung by Klaus Nomi in The Cold Song, featured earlier on in the film.
- Schimmer Sanft den Klang des Tages
One of the main themes in the album and in the film. The piece was scored for one of the two scenes in which Nan is speaking about her relationship with her sister Barbara, and the struggles that led to her suicide. The main line that is sung translates as ‘…reflections of light alleviate the noise of the day..’ – which for us represented the interplay of light and darkness, and the fragility of life and creation that emerges throughout the film. This sentence is repeated as a sort of mantra throughout the song, its harmony dictated by the syllables and the poems’ phonetics.
- The Land And The Sea
This is first orchestral piece in the album and was composed for a very important scene in the film, in which Nan Goldin and the P.A.I.N. organisation (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) successfully occupied the Guggenheim museum in NYC in a demonstration against the Sackler family, with the intention of exposing their accountability in the opioid crisis in the United States, and demanding their name to be erased from the museum’s list of donors. P.A.I.N. is an advocacy organization founded by Nan to respond to the opioid crisis, specifically targeting the Sackler Family for manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the drug Oxycontin through their corporation Purdue Pharma. The piece was re-recorded with a 40-piece string orchestra.
- Sisters I (feat. Nan Goldin)
Sisters I was recorded for a very touching scene in which Nan recounts memories of her sister Barbara and their close relationship. It is a delicate song featuring male and female choral voices around Hölderlin’s text ‘Des Geistes Werden’ (the coming of the spirit..). It is a calm and grounded piece but also revealing a fragile nature, and features Nan’s voice narration taken directly from the film’s scene.
- Des Geistes Werden
This is a continuation of the previous piece, a sort of evolution into something more powerful and unsettling, starting from a delicate and light place and slowly shifting into an aggravated and tenebrous choral song. It was recorded with four singers: Mulay Winter, Holan Gultom, Sidney Kwadjo Frenz and Youka Snell.
- Before The Light
‘Before The Light’ is a delicate song composed of accapella voices and drone synths. For much of the film score we wanted to stay quite neutral’ in terms of emotional expression and play instead with a sense of light vs darkness.
- Witnesses
We recorded string quartets for many of the film’s scenes, this particular piece was inspired by the legendary NEA-censored Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a group exhibition organised by Nan Goldin in 1989 at Artists Space in NYC, including photographs, drawings, paintings, and sculptures by artists Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and David Wojnarowicz, among others, presenting art in response to the AIDS epidemic.
- Zeitgeist
‘Zeitgeist’ is based on a theme we recorded some years back at Napoli Conservatory of Music with an incredible Jean Guillou organ of over 4000 pipes. The theme was reworked with Johannes Malfatti into a composition for full string orchestra and scored for the film’s end scene, which was shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and is documenting the removal of the Sackler family name from its exhibition spaces.
- To Zimmer
Throughout the film, we 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. This song is inspired by Hölderlin’s poem An Zimmern:
The lines of life are various,
Like roads, and the borders of mountains.
What we are here, a god can complete there,
With harmonies, eternal reward, and peace.
- Sisters II (feat. Nan Goldin)
This is another version of Schimmer Sanft den Klang des Tages, this time featuring the voice of Nan as it appears in the film.
Pre-order your copy of the soundtrack on vinyl – or a strictly limited vinyl edition with a signed print – here