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Falling apart together

from Volta by LOULA YORKE

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  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Buy the Full Digital Album

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    This bundle contains:

    - CD in a printed cardboard sleeve with a resealable cellophane envelope. The original cover artwork is by Loula Yorke. The sleeve and body of the CD have changes to the printed text to differentiate them from the 1st run of 100 CDs.

    - 2 blank A6 postcards of the artwork – one blue, one orange/beige – with 'billboard texture effect', printed on 300gsm paper.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Volta via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    edition of 200 

      £8.99 GBP or more 

     

  • Cassette + Digital Album

    Dark Blue or Pumpkin Orange C45 cassette tapes housed in a transparent hard plastic case with full colour printed J-card Original artwork by Loula Yorke.

    1 blank A6 postcard of the cover artwork in either a blue or orange colourway with 'billboard texture effect' and printed on 300gsm paper.

    This is the second run of 50 tapes (25 orange, 25 blue).

    Includes unlimited streaming of Volta via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Volta via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    edition of 100  2 remaining

      £8.99 GBP or more 

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    8
    releases

    Get all 8 LOULA YORKE releases available on Bandcamp and save 30%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Volta, YSMYSMYSM, YOUL, Florescence, Crowd Control Vol 2, Crowd Control Vol 1, LDOLS, and may mixtape. , and , .

    Excludes supporter-only releases.

    Purchasable with gift card

      £29.05 GBP or more (30% OFF)

     

about

Revolving and rotating, swelling and contracting, waxing and waning. The loop is the symbol of infinity, a connection between human pattern-making and cosmic cycles unknown. And just as a tilt in Earth’s axis gives us the seasons, the smallest shift in a sequence can expand one sound into a musical universe.

On her fifth album, composer, sound artist and improviser Loula Yorke steps into a zone of self-imposed order, setting aside the chaos of live improvisation in search of harmony and pattern. Within the closed circuits of Volta, melodies are composed rather than randomly generated, refined through hours of listening, thinking and tweaking… until a wormhole opens and we tumble in.

The seven cycles of Volta are the result of a concerted period of composition. Working every day from the calm of her cottage garden studio in rural Suffolk, Yorke funnelled her overactive mind into a routine of near-monastic study: every day the same, one piece at a time. Restricting her palette to the same set of modules, she set herself hard rules: no granular synthesis, no vocals, no drums. And as a dedicated live performer, each piece had to be reproducible with minimal repatching between tracks. Inspired by the celestial meditations of Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel and Caterina Barbieri, her intention was “to pare everything back and let these circles eat each other”.

Yorke challenged herself to generate mood and variation from the bare minimum of components. “You can’t play chords on a monophonic synth – you have to find them,” she notes. The illusion of polyphony is created through deft use of delay and harmonics, leading to trance-like emotional heights (‘The grounds are changing as they promise to do’), dense whorls of activity, like a night sky seen in rotating time-lapse (‘Staying with the trouble’), or cascading conversations between alternating and duelling synth lines (‘Anecdoche’).

Yorke’s systematic approach calls to mind the laborious and intricate pattern-making of heritage textile weavers –“the original algorithmic composers” – and a long history of orderly musical expression. Echoes of 20th century minimalism and 17th century baroque emerge through the poetic counterpoint of the opening track (‘It's been decided that if you lay down no-one will die’). Radiation from spaced-out ‘70s kosmische is picked up in experiments with probability and envelope length (‘The hidden messages in water’). With two sequences running side-by-side at varying tempos, Yorke makes her escape from the expectations of both dance music and western tonality, squeezing bursts of microtonal colour from her machines via extreme glissando (‘An example of periodic time’, ‘Falling apart together’).

Once composed, Yorke’s sequences were recorded live, with no post-facto assembly or reconfiguration in the edit suite. The resulting seven pieces capture a discrete achievement in the Cottage Studio – but the circuit is only really complete when it meets the listener’s mind. Volta is music for mental travel and infinite introspection: meditations on the endless-everything of the looping sequence. Suns and spheres in unstoppable motion. Hypocycloid eternal curves. Let the circles eat each other.

“For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheres…” Johannes Kepler

Chal Ravens

credits

from Volta, released January 23, 2024
Composition, Performance, Recording, Production – Loula Yorke
Mastering – Dominic Clare at Declared Sound
Liner notes – Chal Ravens

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about

LOULA YORKE image

LOULA YORKE UK

Autobiography and algorithms.

Weaving patterns into sound on a modular synth.

UK live shows 2024:

5 Oct, Levitation 24, Bedford, UK

12 Oct, Machina Bristonica, Bristol, UK ... more

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