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Album: Volta
Track: 1 of 7
Title: It's been decided that if you lay down no-one will die
Artist: Loula Yorke
Label: Truxalis
Cat#: TRX17
Formats: CD/Tape/Digital
Single Release: 23 October 2024
Album Release: 23 January 2024

The slowly-shifting skies of a peach-coloured atmosphere, or, viewed from the other end of the telescope, a bird’s-eye-view of the fractal dimensions of sea ice, melting and forming, mandelbrot-esque coastlines morphing across Deep Time.

“It’s about overwhelm, the times when I’m consciously slowing down, trying to hold space, yet everything is still rushing in. I’m experimenting with what you can do to ameliorate that. The title is a twist on some lines that have really helped me at these times, from a piece written by the mythopoet Robert Bly.”

“When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.”


About This Release:

Music composed and produced by Loula Yorke
Mastered by Dominic Clare at Declared Sound
Artwork by Loula Yorke

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 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 laborious and intricate pattern-making of early handweavers – “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.

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