Loula Yorke - Volta (2024)

“It’s all about the idea of cyclical time”, says Loula Yorke, calling us on a journey of sonic adventure through her latest album, 'Volta'. In 41 minutes we are spun across a galaxy, 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; 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.

While 'Volta' stands on the solid foundations of Yorke’s previous work – the errant experimental frequencies of ysmysmysm, the scratchy techno punk of 'LDOLS', the tangled gravitational mass of 'Florescence' – this latest album marks a complete departure for her in both process and palette. Here Yorke steps into a zone of self-imposed order, setting aside the chaos of live improvisation, which previously found her building and trearing apart synth patches afresh for every track. Within the luminous sonic tessellations of 'Volta', synth lines are programmed rather than randomly generated, refined through days spent in front her modular sequencer, listening and adjusting … until a wormhole opens and we tumble in.

The seven cycles of Volta are thus the result of a concerted period of composition. Working every day from the calm of what she calls her ‘Cottage 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 a single 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, to use repetition and a changing emphasis within a sequence to gradually reveal these glorious cyclical patterns – then let the circles eat 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 imply 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 intricate pattern-making of hand weavers – “the original algorithmic composers” – as well as 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 played and recorded live on her modular synthesiser, 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.