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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.
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.
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.