Corps Perdu is the new album by Lamin Fofana on Shelter Press, part of his long practice of sound environments drawn from the writers of the Black Studies tradition: W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Dionne Brand, Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Before becoming a record, the music was presented in a series of collective reading and listening sessions in Paris, Barcelona, Tunis and New York, where members of the audience read aloud fragments of texts chosen by Fofana while he mixed live.

The main source this time is Aimé Césaire's Corps Perdu (1950), ten poems published with engravings by Picasso that merge fragments of bodies and plants. The ten tracks follow the arc of the poems, a 'lost body' that dissolves and becomes liquid, a descent without landing. Fofana works with simple, hand-played melodies passed through dense processing, full-bodied keys, wind, sand and crackle; there is rhythm throughout, but never the club pulse of some earlier records such as the 'Obscure Light' pair on Works in Metal, of which this is a sibling.

From the opening 'To Become Liquid', with its unresolved chord rippling outward, through 'Blank to Fill on the Visa of Pollen' with its field recordings of a passing crowd, to the closing 'Ode to Guinea', the album moves between arrival and departure, melody running forward and in reverse. All music and mastering by Fofana, design by Bartolomé Sanson, text by Andrea Zarza Canova. Double LP.