(2025)
Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith

Accompanying the announcement of the new 2-track EP, out March 21 via Bella Union, is the first fifteen minute track, titled “Children Of Chernobyl”.

On the edge of the forest surrounding Chernobyl, a stone’s throw from the Pripyat River, stands the church of St. Elijah, the only house of worship still operational within the 1000 square-mile radioactive exclusion zone. There, in the courtyard, stands the Bell of Sorrow, which rings just once a year, at exactly 1:23am on April 26, the moment when human history was forever altered, 39 years ago, as Reactor Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, scattering its deadly, invisible poison throughout the land.

Ten miles northwest, at the centre of the zone, stands a much larger bell-shaped structure, a 31,000-tonne sarcophagus of concrete and steel, tall enough to entomb the Notre-Dame... (Continues)