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GRAVITY PLEASURE
FLINTA-focused record label & platform
Co-Founder | 2025 - present, Berlin, DE & Glasgow, GB
Ideated in early 2025 by Slowfoam & slyn, Gravity Pleasure is a FLINTA-focused music label and platform for aqueous sounds, education & solidarity. Gravity Pleasure has hosted events at Kwia in Berlin, unit3 in Manchester, and exit in Glasgow. They have hosted educational events, including a FLINTA-focused Synth Club in Glasgow with Sonia Killman and Sonic Worldbuilding course online with Slowfoam and Sk [Rain].
✧ cloud collecting #37: Gravity Pleasure (Slowfoam & slyn
✧ Boomkat - Water Bodies VA - Gravity Pleasure
Water Bodies VA
In June 2025, Gravity Pleasure launched its inaugural release, Water Bodies, a stunning 21-track VA featuring 28 FLINTA artists, including Yetsuby, Flora Yin Wong, ophélie, Felisha Ledesma, tibslc, and more.Press
✧ An interview w/ Madelyn Byrd & Ashlynn White by Fanny Chiarello (Basta Now!)✧ cloud collecting #37: Gravity Pleasure (Slowfoam & slyn
✧ Boomkat - Water Bodies VA - Gravity Pleasure
Links
✧ Bandcamp
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SONIC WORLDBUILDING
4 - 6 week courses & daylong workshops
Educator & Developer | 2024 - present
Sonic Worldbuilding spans music production, theory, and play to explore sound as an apparatus of interconnectedness and the vistas of (im)possiblility. For 4-6 weeks, participants invigorate their creative practice with exercises rooted in deep listening/somatics, deconstruction/destruction, failure, collage/sampling, re-worlding, and collaboration. The curriculum weaves speculative fiction, queer theory, surrealism, utopian theory, ecology, contemporary sound studies, and music production. Sonic Worldbuilding has been taught online with Soundial, in-person at Kwia in Berlin, and online with the support of Gravity Pleasure & Sk [Rain].
Iterations
✧ Sonic Worldbuilding with Slowfoam & Sk [Rain] - 5 weeks online - 2025✧ Sonic Worldbuilding Methodology & Practice - 5 weeks - Kwia - 2025
✧ Sonic Worldbuilding II Methodology & Practice - 4 weeks - Soundial - 2025
✧ Subversive Creative Practice & Sonic Worldbuilding - 4 weeks - Soundial - 2024
✧ Weaving Sounds (Guest Lecture) - Soundial 2024
Formats
This course can be modified to fit various formats & contexts - from 1-2 day workshops to semester long courses, in person & online, for children, adults without experience, students, and established artists. If you’d like to host Sonic Worldbuilding at your festival, event space, university, residency, etc, please get in touch :)
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How might we relate with the world beyond humans?Alongside collaborator Lou Croff Blake, through play-based research in Valle de Ricote, we integrate our experiences of queerness – a radical homecoming to self – with ecological homecoming to our planet and its family of lifeforms. In a time of climate emergency, we cultivate our entanglement with ecosystems, relearning our own “naturalness” as humans, and as queers. But logic and information are not enough for us to comprehend that we are natural; embodied knowledge is a missing link in understanding that earth is our home – that we come not into the world, but out of it.
As a part of AADK’s Cruce program in Blanca, ES, we integrated theoretical research and discussion with experiments in wild spaces, integrating our queer bodies with dirt, mud, and stone. Navigating lines between innocuous anthropomorphisation and our own bewilderment, we speculate on how ‘queering’ may be a tool that translates from identity politics into ecomotivator. We developed a methodology, evolving our practice of ‘tuning’ – feeling-with the ‘other’ – to ‘playing-with,’ a curious, interactive, trans-species mode of relating.
As our research around more-than-human narratives expands, we aim to translate our process to other wild and rural spaces, puzzling together the unique entanglements of identity, locality, and intersectional environmentalism.
Graciously funded by The Goethe Institute’s Culture Moves Europe Grant.
Glossary
→ Playing-with: A Glossary for Queer Ecologies (EN)
→ Glosario (ES)
Film & Installation
Showcase of work at Centro Negra, March 2025. The installation included foraged artifacts, copies of the glossary, shape poems “Thinking-with Lichen,” and a screening of the 20-minute film “The Stone is at The Center,” currently in post-production.
Book
The Stone Is At The Center will be developed into a book in 2026.
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Field recordist Pablo Diserens provides some of the album’s most arcane material, handing over environmental recordings of sulphur pools, Arctic terns and glacial streams. The lengthy ‘Divine Morpho, Shimmering’ deploys a swarm of insects, forming a looped, uneven rhythm that counters Byrd’s pulsing electronics. Choral stems mesh with uncanny strings, blurring the line that separates artificial from organic sound sources. Byrd uses mutation and reconstruction as a form of “speculative melting” to bring us closer to utopia. On ‘Like Phantom Memories In The Slinking Storm’, one of the album’s most levitational moments, they tease twangy harp-lyre plucks into dubbed-out smudges, eventually given a reprise on ‘Grief Rituals’ where the same riffs are stretched into slower phrases, queered against giddy, xenharmonic drones.
Bird calls and tremulous exotica mark the brilliant ‘Fragrant Dusking’, and ‘Soft Body Virisdescence’ takes us to a gurgling, kaleidoscopic climax, with electronic processes thrust into the foreground. ‘Of Data & Delight’ distills all the album’s sonic elements into a sort of delirious fever dream, using pitched animal calls to signal sensuality. It’s not ambient, exactly, and it’s not wholeheartedly electro-acoustic either. The record exists at a place of convergence, as one era wrestles with a new dawn, and real life glimpses high fantasy.
CreditsMusic composed and produced by Madelyn Byrd. Flute on Enlightened Smudge by Diane Barbé Accompaniment on Divine Morphos by Ran Park. Field Recordings by Pablo Diserens.& Madelyn Byrd. Mixed by Madelyn Byrd. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Photography by Somewhere Press. Press shot by Abby Beatrice. Centre labels by Ebb Bayley. Insert text by Lou Croff Blake Design by Musheto Fernández. Distributed by Boomkat.
Contact
slowfoam@gmail.com
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The Stone Is At The Center
installation & queer ecology research
Artist & Researcher | April 2025, Blanca, ES
How might we relate with the world beyond humans?Alongside collaborator Lou Croff Blake, through play-based research in Valle de Ricote, we integrate our experiences of queerness – a radical homecoming to self – with ecological homecoming to our planet and its family of lifeforms. In a time of climate emergency, we cultivate our entanglement with ecosystems, relearning our own “naturalness” as humans, and as queers. But logic and information are not enough for us to comprehend that we are natural; embodied knowledge is a missing link in understanding that earth is our home – that we come not into the world, but out of it. As a part of AADK’s Cruce program in Blanca, ES, we integrated theoretical research and discussion with experiments in wild spaces, integrating our queer bodies with dirt, mud, and stone. Navigating lines between innocuous anthropomorphisation and our own bewilderment, we speculate on how ‘queering’ may be a tool that translates from identity politics into ecomotivator. We developed a methodology, evolving our practice of ‘tuning’ – feeling-with the ‘other’ – to ‘playing-with,’ a curious, interactive, trans-species mode of relating.
As our research around more-than-human narratives expands, we aim to translate our process to other wild and rural spaces, puzzling together the unique entanglements of identity, locality, and intersectional environmentalism.
Graciously funded by The Goethe Institute’s Culture Moves Europe Grant.
Glossary
→ Playing-with: A Glossary for Queer Ecologies (EN)
→ Glosario (ES)
Film & Installation
Showcase of work at Centro Negra, March 2025. The installation included foraged artifacts, copies of the glossary, shape poems “Thinking-with Lichen,” and a screening of the 20-minute film “The Stone is at The Center,” currently in post-production.
Book
The Stone Is At The Center will be developed into a book in 2026.
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Transcorporeal Portal | album [LP + Digital]
March 2024 on Somewhere Press, Distributed by Boomkat
The polyrhythmic pulse of the natural world surges through Byrd’s productions, and though the sounds are mostly electronic and strictly metered, a landscape teeming with insects, birds, and wildlife fills the horizon. We’re languidly ushered through the gates on the opening ‘Enlightened Smudge on the Machine’, juxtaposing glassy tones with flute (from Berlin-based sound artist Diane Barbé) and skittering percussion that could have been lifted straight off Björk’s ‘Vespertine’. “No traffic, under the stem,” a stoic voice muses while sounds dissolve into waterlogged ambience. There are hints of vintage West Coast new age music, but Byrds’ over-arching theme is one of a contemporary digital reality slowly harmonising with its distant, bucolic past.
Field recordist Pablo Diserens provides some of the album’s most arcane material, handing over environmental recordings of sulphur pools, Arctic terns and glacial streams. The lengthy ‘Divine Morpho, Shimmering’ deploys a swarm of insects, forming a looped, uneven rhythm that counters Byrd’s pulsing electronics. Choral stems mesh with uncanny strings, blurring the line that separates artificial from organic sound sources. Byrd uses mutation and reconstruction as a form of “speculative melting” to bring us closer to utopia. On ‘Like Phantom Memories In The Slinking Storm’, one of the album’s most levitational moments, they tease twangy harp-lyre plucks into dubbed-out smudges, eventually given a reprise on ‘Grief Rituals’ where the same riffs are stretched into slower phrases, queered against giddy, xenharmonic drones.
Bird calls and tremulous exotica mark the brilliant ‘Fragrant Dusking’, and ‘Soft Body Virisdescence’ takes us to a gurgling, kaleidoscopic climax, with electronic processes thrust into the foreground. ‘Of Data & Delight’ distills all the album’s sonic elements into a sort of delirious fever dream, using pitched animal calls to signal sensuality. It’s not ambient, exactly, and it’s not wholeheartedly electro-acoustic either. The record exists at a place of convergence, as one era wrestles with a new dawn, and real life glimpses high fantasy.
CreditsMusic composed and produced by Madelyn Byrd. Flute on Enlightened Smudge by Diane Barbé Accompaniment on Divine Morphos by Ran Park. Field Recordings by Pablo Diserens.& Madelyn Byrd. Mixed by Madelyn Byrd. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Photography by Somewhere Press. Press shot by Abby Beatrice. Centre labels by Ebb Bayley. Insert text by Lou Croff Blake Design by Musheto Fernández. Distributed by Boomkat.
This is a selection of projects, for more please see → CV