»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, Édouard Glissant, Suzanne Césaire, and Aimé Césaire 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 its eruption, and lets us listen to Césaire’s ›flying seed dreaming very loudly‹. The album’s track titles and narrative arc hum in and out and alongside Césaire’s poetry, mainly Césaire’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 Césaire’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‹.

»To Become Liquid« cracks the album open and leaves the door unlatched. Taken together with the following tracks, »I Say River Corrosive« and »Infinite Regress Into Futures Past«, a journey is initiated. A journey that is an abyssal descent, falling and never landing, falling up as much as falling down. This journey speaks more fluently of the anticipation of arrival than any sense of loss or nostalgic longing for return. Césaire reminds us: ›do not blow the dust away, everything shall be visibly rhythm, and what would we recover? not even our secret‹. As the unresolved chord in »To Become Liquid« ripples outward, a weakness spreads through the arms, gravity drains from the extremities, the body buoys, weightless, in liquid transformation. Blood drips into water, clouding the rippled wake on its surface. Césaire speaks again: ›Throb, throb the very essence of darkness on the wing and full-throated from so much dying‹.

The ›lost body‹ finds itself caught in two directions: arrival and departure. Fofana’s patient patterns and full-bodied keys sting sweetly, underlaid by wind, sand, and static crackle. They do not foretell the shipwreck but work within it to create a home. First in the body, and then as it moves, spectre-like, through a crowd—as we can hear in »Blank to Fill on the Visa of Pollen«, in which field recordings evoke a transient, faceless space. Throughout the album—but especially within its epicentre, »Corps Perdu«—melodies move forward and in reverse, circling and crackling, offering a beating story line through the unfathomable abyss. »Ode to Guinea« closes the album and brings together the multiplicity of timelines present in »Corps Perdu«, creating an impressive moving structure, constellating mid-sky.

In an interview published in »Tropiques« in 1945, Césaire 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 Césaire they create ›an unstunted reverie, its memory pulmonic and its heart in its hand‹.