Homesickness is a bitter medicine to yield appreciation; there is no better feeling than a return guided by longing. 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.

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, a rest station from our ‘whats next’ linear overdrive. 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.

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. Slowfoam teaches us that speculative melting yields radical presencing.