Author: Loula Yorke

Crowd Control Vol 2 up for pre-order now

Crowd Control Vol 2 is the studio accompaniment to my recent live album on the Tigerforce Records imprint. Spoken word, noise, beats and synths are blended with field recordings of crowded spaces to create a hustling, bustling meditation on human contact.

The 4-track EP opens with the pacy, wonky noise pop of Rush Hour. Spoken words are frozen in time to resemble sung notes; a saccharine synth line is tempered by the sounds of subway platforms and unsettling lyrics floating by on the ether. Eat Out To Help Out is all percussive, glassy, resonance paired with rumbling sub frequencies; playing with freezing and pitch shifting the familiar ‘tink’ of cutlery hitting crockery in a busy café. Our Streets fizzes with tight sizzles and big kicks; frequency modulation and granular processing come together to evoke something alien and futuristic, while anti-roads protestors chant in the streets. The final track on the EP is High Streets, a solid swirl of 1980s Roland synth sounds punctuated by the rhythm of my voice caught in repetition, cut through with snatches of shoppers’ conversation and the shuffle and bustle of moving feet.

Release date: 4 December 2020

Oram Awards 2020

So happy to have had my work recognised with a special commendation by this year’s Oram Awards, supported by the PRS Foundation and the BBC New Radiophonic Workshop. If we’d been able to be together for a ceremony this year, I’d be standing alongside a stellar bunch of artists – Nicole Raymond, Poulomi Desai, Una Lee, Vicky Clarke and Yifeat Ziv. Instead this beautiful object arrived at home on Monday and I got my picture taken alongside my original Atari Punk Girls, which is the next best thing 🖤 The award itself is a piece of artwork made by Lasercut London, playing with pioneering electronic composer Daphne Oram’s distinctive waveforms and UV light.

‘Beyond a Boundary’ 5 November Tracklist

Listen live at 7pm UK time on 5 November 2020 via listen.camp or catch up later on Mixcloud

Paul Hierophant – Voices from the diaspora

Begg – Corporal Pun

Maja SK Ratkje – live at Tusk Festival

Dengue Dengue Dengue – Xongo

214 – Certain Indications

Clipping – Say The Name

Amhain – Lx4

Alabaster de Plume – I’m The Queen

Me Lost Me – Worm Unearthed

Radical Kitten – Say Shit

Fulacht Fiadh – Mystery Mountain Hop

Loula Yorke – Eat Out To Help Out

CHALICES – Gravewalking

CHALICES – Conference B 10pm

BBC Music Introducing LIVE 2020

I’ve contributed my thoughts to a BBC Music Introducing LIVE masterclass about how to keep working, pushing and promoting what you do as an artist working outside of a mainstream setting. The result was a lively conversation, entitled “How non-conforming artists prosper in their surroundings”, hosted by Angelle Joseph and included veteran drum’n’bass producer, Digital, and R&B songwriter and artist Ricardo Williams, as well as myself. The program lasts 30 minutes and goes live on Saturday 25 October, airing on the radio on BBC Suffolk at 8pm and online on BBC Sounds at 10pm where it’s available for listen to for 30 days.

‘Beyond a Boundary’ 8 October Tracklist

Tracklist

Melissa Pons – wideness / Natalia Beylis – Real Live Birds / Loula Yorke – Crowd Control Vol 1 (excerpt) / UKAEA – Vampire Moth (feat. AJA) / Ghösh – LYAOF / SAD MAN – House Work / Jay Diggs – W.A.P. (Funk) / Saint Thomas LeDoux – Jilted / Controlled Weirdness – Suburban Menace / FAUZIA – berceuse / Loraine James – Mmm / Gaelynn Lea – The Long Way Around / Efa Supertramp – Llygru / Dave Stitch – Vintage Warehouse 2020 / Dylab – Hiding All The Cards / Crass x Jeffery Lewis x Dave Stitch – Big A Little A

This show is dedicated to Stuart Tokam: the man, the myth, the Headfuk sound system legend. Rest In Peace. The samples on ‘Vintage Warehouse 2020’ were recovered recently on an old hard-drive and feature Stuart and Amelia singing their merry little lungs out whilst enjoying life to the full c.2003.

Crowd Control Vo1 up for preorder now

A live recording of Crowd Control Vol 1, including a series of interlinked preparatory studies, is up for pre-order on Bandcamp now. The release will drop on Saturday 10 October 2020 after the show at TUSK Virtual.

Crowd Control Vol 1 is a 23-minute installation, film and live sound performance examining themes of privacy and protest in the age of surveillance capitalism.

Our digital communications and social posts feel private but are in fact mined for information and predictive behavioural data by third parties, from supermarkets to state agencies. Similarly, crowds feel like a safe environment in which to find solidarity and take action, but are in fact intensely watched, with individual people identified and criminalised later on the basis of social media posts and video footage.

The Piece

A voltage-controlled laser is trained on a vase of flowers, lit candles and curiosities sitting on a silver tray. The movement of the laser is controlled by the sound waves created during the performance.

A film plays, heavily featuring the colour yellow. Wildflowers are inspected under a microscope; crowds of people process slowly through city streets.

A live sound piece is performed using my Innalog modular synthesiser and a drum machine. I open the piece by layering white noise over recordings of crowds gathered at social justice protests: the resulting mix of sonic data – ‘signal’ and ‘noise’ – is then sculpted over time using different types of filtration and FX, including granular and spectral processing. Melodic elements start to appear: oscillators bleep, rising and falling; drums; the sound of a female voice is looped to create rhythm. Gradually the mix is peeled back to the foundational building blocks of the piece: white noise and crowd noise, people and data, information littered across the digital panopticon; but who is controlling the laser?

Showings

Lock East, Sound City Ipswich, Friday 2nd October 2020 – livestream performance

TUSK Virtual, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Saturday, 10 October 2020 – pre-recorded livestream performance

‘Freeness’ on BBC Radio 3, Saturday 10 October 2020 – an excerpt of the pre-record for TUSK

HERE, The Art Station, Saxmundham, Saturday 21 November to Sunday 13 December 2020 – livestream performance; gallery showing; online exhibition; framed prints for sale.

Sound City Ipswich

⚡FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER⚡ The Smokehouse have invited me in to livestream my new work ‘Crowd Control Vol 1’ from their amazing new filming set-up for Sound City Ipswich 2020 alongside some of the most exciting talent in our fine region.⚡ The set-up includes performance and voltage-controlled laser show – I’m really excited about having more opportunities to share it with audiences in the absence of any of us getting together in a room to listen to live music any time soon 😢
.
A live recording of ‘Crowd Control Vol 1’ including out-takes and extras will be released on Bandcamp after the showing at TUSK Virtual on 10 October 2020 via new label Tigerforce Records 🐆
.
Link for pre-orders coming soon!

Prepping for the stream the night before

TUSK Virtual

The internationally renowned TUSK Festival returns to celebrate its 10th edition this October. Having already announced its plans for its expected live edition over 3 days in October at partner organisation Sage Gateshead, the TUSK team’s plans were overtaken by events and the global pandemic, rendering their initial intentions unfeasible. So, with aspirations adapted to the new reality and years of live streaming and digital programming experience behind them, TUSK, still working in partnership with Sage Gateshead, are now delighted to announce TUSK Virtual 2020 – a two-week online version of the festival that falls somewhere between a virtual version of one of the most adventurous music festivals on the planet and the most raucous rollercoaster of an avant garde TV station you could ever imagine.

Across two weeks of programming, TUSK Virtual’s uniquely diverse menu of adventurous music has grown even more expansive, normal rules of festival production abandoned by the plague and a whole host of often unreachable international artists now able to join the programme via web connections. Tusk Virtual will also feature an enhanced version of the renowned film programme with nightly midnight movie selections and expanded weekend film feasts, plus talks and discussions from people across the global adventurous music community, guest DJ mixes, a selection of gems from the vast TUSK archive and all held together by our team of guest presenters that includes David Liebe Hart (Tim And Eric Awesome Show Great Job!), Rock N Roll Jackie Stewart from Oregon’s seminal Smegma and the ‘cardboard Prince’ himself, Robert Ridley-Shackleton.

I will be adding a 23-minute timed sound and video performance into the mix on Saturday 10th October 2020.

You can find the full line up here