songs for the crossing
Songs for The Crossing is a collaborative performance series and forthcoming album between Lou Croff Blake, Pablo Diserens, and Slowfoam (Madelyn Byrd). First initiated in early 2023, it has iterated in Berlin and in the forest outside of Seattle, USA. Most recently, in April 2024, it was performed at 90mil during Slowfoam’s album release event with Somewhere Press. The piece is a selection of ‘trans campfire stories’ – which includes Blake’s original and curated works – that float in an otherworldly soundscape, composed of daxophone, field recordings, and live synthesized sound. The complete effect is a hypnotic and darkly humorous meditation on transformation, embodiment, and navigating joys and dangers of queer identity. Collaborators Blake, Diserens, and Byrd work closely to develop an interwoven conversation between sound and voice; the ‘landscape’ and the orator melt in and out of each other, forging a chimerical, supraverbal language that is simultaneously alien and organic.
→ Listen to the live performance
Album & Atlas (2026)
In fall 2026, Songs for The Crossing will be released as both an album and book with the publishing house Somewhere Press (Glasgow, UK).As a printed book, Songs for The Crossing builds out a collaborative lore of the ‘gender wilderness.’ This parallel space is depicted as an animate landscape that bears the traveler along, offering a sanctuary for processing the psychosomatic spectrum one faces during transition. The ~200-page book contains short stories, poems, essays, maps, and artworks by queer and trans artists who extrapolate on the gender wilderness. The wilderness is, of course, a subjective space; the terrain appears in different forms to different people who visit. But its common denominator is the knowledge that getting lost in a wild place – “bewildered,” as Jack Halberstam would put it – is an integral part of queering. This wildness is both superhuman and hypernatural. Like a chrysalis, the gender wilderness is a container in which we metamorph. The book will be printed with risograph publisher Good Press (Glasgow, UK). It will be distributed online by Somewhere Press and select independent bookstores in Glasgow and Berlin.
As an album, which will be published in cassette and digital formats in 2026, Songs for The Crossing interweaves spoken word with sound and instrumentation to evoke the traveler’s nebulous surroundings. The eponymous Songs themselves are chanted in this soundscape, sometimes intelligible and sometimes fading into the ambiance of the music. Pablo Diserens and Madelyn Byrd (aka Slowfoam) are the primary collaborators; the three of us work together to develop the album’s structure and palette with field recording, electronic instruments, and daxophone. Other queer and trans artists from the Somewhere Press community will contribute elements to compositions, integrating multiple visions into the sonic worldbuilding.
gravity pleasure
sonic worldbuilding
feu fou
▹ songs for the crossing
chimera
transcorporeal portal
the stone is at the center
a tuned body
worlding with earth
sympoiesis apparatus
output ritual
kindly
spring ~.~*~.~
our tomorrow
sonic worldbuilding
feu fou
▹ songs for the crossing
chimera
transcorporeal portal
the stone is at the center
a tuned body
worlding with earth
sympoiesis apparatus
output ritual
kindly
spring ~.~*~.~
our tomorrow