Slowfoam – Night Rider

As Madelyn Byrd’s Through Damp Canyons opens, the camera is still. It’s a hot, dark night on the Sonoran Desert where they came of age – so dark that the arid landscape immediately disappears into the backdrop as thousands of insect wings buzz like uninterrupted static. Then, a motorcycle revs into the foreground, and the camera begins to move with it. Over the course of Night Rider’s next 50 minutes, Byrd’s amorphous soundscapes transmogrify in unpredictable and cinematic ways.

Byrd’s production has evolved since Transcorporeal Portal, and the title of second track Of Nature, Of Bodies, Of Dreams acts as a kind of thesis statement for their psychedelic minimalism. In the edges and cracks between key and vivid details – spoken word, more traditional vocalisations, and Patrick Shiroishi’s saxophone – Byrd scatters field recordings, drone, confident employment of space and silence, and other meticulous sound design which shapeshifts between interiors and exteriors, the living and inanimate, truth and myth, memories and dreams. Until, something more bodily and kinetic emerges in the record’s final one-two punch of What Is, What Was and In Perfume, Remember – a trip-hop butterfly from the ambient chrysalis.

Listen to: Through Damp Canyons, Carpet Memory, What Is, What Was