Corps Perdu emerges from Lamin Fofana's ongoing practice of creating immersive and multisensory sound environments, informed and inspired by the historically rich texts of scholars and poets working in the tradition of Black Studies. The words of W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Dionne Brand, Fred Moten, Ã‰douard Glissant, Suzanne CÃ©saire and AimÃ© CÃ©saire are transmuted and circulated as sound, offered to listeners through radio, live events, albums and installations. Fofana honours his sources with an audible historical awareness, yet his sounds always simultaneously open out into the turbulent uncertainties of the present. The music we hear on the album Corps Perdu was previewed within a series of collective reading and listening sessions carried out in Paris, Barcelona, Tunis and New York City, where voices from the audience read aloud fragments from a body of texts Fofana had selected. The spontaneous unfolding of close reading and listening, mixed live by Fofana in these collective listening experiences, speaks to the open-ended quality of Corps Perdu. The album, now published, is but one iteration of this ongoing inquiry into the relationship between sound and text. Corps Perdu presents an introspective journey with no return, and as such is full of omens of all kinds. Across ten tracks Lamin Fofana creates a sibling or companion to the transformation he initiated in his previous album Works in Metal, building a narrative that takes us into Krakatoa prior to it's eruption, and let's us listen to CÃ©saire's 'flying seed dreaming very loudly'. The album's track titles and narrative arc hum in and out and alongside CÃ©saire's poetry, mainly CÃ©saire's 1950 collection Corps Perdu, in which the ten poems are accompanied by engravings by Picasso merging fragments of bodies and plants-a collaboration that emerged from their first encounter two years earlier, at the Communist-led World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, in Wroclaw, Poland. The music on Corps Perdu labours intuitive hand-held melodies through dense processing. There are many rhythms throughout, though these never surrender to the density of the dancefloor grooves we've heard Fofana craft on previous albums (think of the 'Obscure Light' pair from Works in Metal for example). Instead, Fofana gently releases the clenched hands CÃ©saire's Corps Perdu begins with: 'Among me, from myself, to myself, outside any constellation, clenched in my hands only, the rare hiccup of an ultimate raving spasm, keep vibrating word'. The album carries through sound the scattering and liquid fragmentation that shape the desperate metamorphosis of a 'lost body'.In an interview published in Tropiques in 1945, CÃ©saire spoke of poetry as a 'rupestral design in the stuff of sound'. That a stone can hold an image, and that this image may be of sound, that then becomes poetry, is a form of progression not foreign to Fofana's music, which likewise works through transmutation. Even when intricately rich with text, Fofana's Corps Perdu invites the listener into expansive and affective channels of sound, a powerful iteration within his open inquiry, which continues to resist any definitive or final form. The melodies travel as pollen, and across waking and dreaming states, like lullabies-with CÃ©saire they create 'an unstunted reverie, it's memory pulmonic and it's heart in it's hand'.

Tracklist:

To Become Liquid
I Say River Corrosive
Infinite Regress Into Futures Past
Ex-Voto for a Shipwreck
Postcards from the Wreck
Blank to Fill on the Visa of Pollen
Corps Perdu
Naissances
Lay of the Rover
Ode to Guinea

UPC: 788362412524
Label: Shelter Press
Release Date: 10.16.26
Format: Vinyl

[PRE-ORDER] Lamin Fofana - Corps Perdu (LP)