- 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
£8.99GBPor 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.
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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
supported by 81 fans who also own “Falling apart together”
This is very close to what I heard/felt everytime we visited the grandparents in Runcorn.
Ominous dread. Bleak dystopia. Concrete and terraced houses. Plus the air smells! MonkeyMajiks
With the A-Side handled by Laura Trance and the B-Side by All True, “Kontratape 06” offers two different spins on glitchy electronic music. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 17, 2021
Catalan physicist, musician, and producer nara is neus delivers a gorgeous, immersive ambient EP that is stunning in its beauty. Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 12, 2024
supported by 74 fans who also own “Falling apart together”
This is as good as the officially released WRNTDP titles on CIS. Very pleased to pick it up, where the pieces here are longer than most on the records they benefit from the slow unwinding they are afforded. The 18 minute live set excerpt is particularly immersive. Wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to release this on vinyl as a companion to the inevitable repressing of This Nation's Most Central Location. Great stuff. Oh and you get a cool magazine to read as well. Awesome. shaun rogan