Transcorporeal Portal
In December 2023, Madelyn Byrd (Slowfoam) asked me to write a text for their upcoming release Transcorporeal Portal.
Listening to the unreleased album, I let myself sink into their imaginative soundscape, tuning my synaesthesia into the supra-sensory experience in my headphones. After a week of repeated deep listening sessions, I churned out the most psychedelic assemblage of words of my entire career.
This text, which illustrates Transcorporeal Portal’s “paraworld,” can be found on the album insert.
Listen:
Insert Excerpt:
“You’ve just found a portal, congratulations! Have you ever stumbled on one of these before? They are easter eggs among us, hiding behind plain sight. Often destabilizing to observe, often delicious to enter. A portal may situate itself by the street curb at night, in a tree trunk, or 30 feet off the ground in clear air. Its membrane may resemble a funhouse mirror: a rippling, confused reflection of the familiar. It will make you smile; it’s a flirtatious one, for sure, and will beckon warmly (cheeky little portal). Move closer, and you glimpse a vast space beyond the warping surface of the ovoid disc. Your ears hook on its siren song, a faint melody that downplays the risks of uprooting. You feel the pinch at the back of your shirt collar and, like a kitten in mom’s jaws, the yawning hole pulls you through its bubbling sphincter.
The paraworld: the realm of the dissolved, of the puddled, of goo-beings. Its atmosphere has head-spinning pH levels, a cocktail of acidic gasses (nature’s corrosives) and ozone (nature’s purifier). Upon first inhale, the air undresses you from the inside out, a lovingly caustic solvent. Your weighty meat drops away: no phone/keys/wallet, no clothes, no skin, bones, guts – zeroing out like an onion.”
On Transcorporeal Portal:
“Homesickness is a bitter medicine to yield appreciation. There is no better feeling than a return guided by longing. Spending time in the surreal makes us homesick for the real. Getting lost in the gorgeous wash of the paraworld makes us miss grit, miss the grass poking through the sidewalk, miss the bus stop or laundromat or kitchen sink – whatever site at which we first encountered the portal. Do we dissociate to reassociate? To get homesick for earth’s surface and get ready to really be here. The coagulated self – the reassembled body – holds the lessons of transformation when it leaves the chrysalis. You jump out mid air (bam!) and off you go into the rainy afternoon.
Transcorporeal Portal shares the soundtrack of a realm parallel to our own. This world is perhaps one of the many incarnations of the Bog, the sorta-magical supraspace that layers itself over the mundane. The Bog is a shapeshifter, and so is Slowfoam’s painterly sonic habitat, in which they invite their listener to float outside of time. It offers a rest station from our ‘what’s next’ linear overdrive, our cell blocks on the calendar app, our frequent inhibition to presence ourselves. This album, in such a gridlocked lieu, builds a vigilante spa, where we all may become transcorporeal beings by taking a moment to unravel. As with Bog, what enters will not be the same as what exits. As with Bog, it provokes the pupal state.
Ultimately, the album’s paraworld is a speculative space. We are not really detaching from the Real World, but rather refracting our perspective through the portal’s interface. As with all of Slowfoam’s work, it is a celebration of ‘what if…?’ Slowfoam crafts a braid of theories and practices that incorporate queerness, hydrofeminism, ecotopia, anarchism, alchemy, and the uncanny. Technology and AI are significant themes, which Slowfoam handles with playing-with-fire self-awareness, skirting – yet never indulging – the magma of transhumanism. They situate their amalgam of knowledges into a prefigurative theater, where ideology is played out with both aesthetic precision and scholarly critique. They often say that destruction is the entry point for their creative process. Degenerate to regenerate, rend to reconstruct, in art, and in life. All circles back to Earth, and our exuberant fidelity to the Now, the Here, and the Tomorrow. Slowfoam teaches us that speculative melting yields radical presencing.”
— Lou Croff Blake, 2024
Album Credits:
Music composed and produced by Madelyn Byrd.
Flute on track 1 by Diane Barbé.
Multi-instrumental accompaniment on track 2 by Sharon Ran Park.
Field Recordings from Blanca, Spain by Madelyn Byrd.
Field Recordings from Mylokopi, Greece by Madelyn Byrd and
Pablo Diserens.
Field Recordings from Iceland by Pablo Diserens.
Mixed by Madelyn Byrd.
Mastered by Rashad Becker.
Photography by Somewhere Press.
Centre labels by Ebb Bayley.
Insert text by Lou Croff Blake.
Design by Musheto Fernández.
Distributed by Boomkat.
Live Performance: 16.04.2024 @90mil
During the Transcorporeal Portal album release show, I performed the full text live with Slowfoam and Pablo Diserens, following my performance of Songs for the Crossing. Listen to the full performance here: