Loula Yorke - Time is a Succession of Such Shapes (2025)

Loula Yorke’s Time is a Succession of Such Shapes, and her companion mixtape The Book of Commonplace, don't announce themselves. Something loosens. The temperature shifts. A glass of water might ripple for no reason. Surfaces feel a little off, slicker, or maybe softened. The world stays the same but begins to tilt, almost imperceptibly. Familiar rhythms grow unfamiliar, like perception has been slightly detuned. This isn’t an escape, but a quiet slipstream running alongside. A dream half-recalled, still happening in another room.

This is music with movement at its core. Not forward propulsion, but the way systems loop, how melodies stretch like waking limbs. Arpeggios ripple and fold while circuits glint and return, changed. Synthesis here doesn’t operate as technology, it feels like weather, like thought. Even in its most animated moments, the album breathes with internal gravity.

In "Kenning I," textures rise slowly, touched by soft voltage. "Success in Circuit Lies I" coils upward in melodic spirals, while "Let a Sound Complete its Life I" moves like water beneath a thin sheet of ice, rhythmic and hushed. Yorke’s restraint doesn’t reduce, it shapes. Each piece is built with attention to contour, to space that shimmers and shifts.

"Kenning II" pulses with effusive color, shapes blooming and collapsing in a glowing thrum. Rhythm emerges not from percussion, but from the lean of each phrase into the next. "Beautiful Things in Humble Places" merges clarity and blur, its voices flickering like reflections on water. "An Ironic Yet Devastating Demand" turns inward, echoing something solemn, while "Barely Aware of the Cup in My Hands" dances along the edge of form, bright and feral.

The entire album feels tuned to a deep emotional palette. It shifts fluidly between playfulness and ache, wonder and melancholy. Some moments feel devotional, others almost giddy. There’s no single mood, just gradients, unfolding. Yorke never forces a resolution. Instead, she leaves room for the unresolved to resonate, for loops to become revelations, for fragments to feel complete in their incompleteness.

This isn’t ambient in the passive sense, nor is it bound to grid or groove. It exists in the space between sensation and system. Each sound feels cultivated, not programmed. Nothing is excess. Everything hums. Time is a Succession of Such Shapes listens like a shifting grid of attention. Intimate, quietly alive, and shaped by the slow pull of time.