Transcorporeal Portal
Released 15 March 2024 on Somewhere Press  
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music

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 ‘whats 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.