24th April 2026
Time codes are in bold
00:00 Some time last summer I strapped a pair of rubberised hydrophones to either side of a tuned tongue drum like it was some kind of sonic metal skull, and left the whole assemblage out in the rain. There’s a video of it somewhere. I’ll put a link here when I get a minute.
00:20 A gift for the Cottage Studio! An early 90s Yamaha Clavinova PF-100, later maltreated (by me) during transit, sticky-silent keys and all. Here are its sounds.
00:24 The sounds of pylons fizzing in the pissing rain up near the Roundway White Horse last November. My planned route back from the local chalky cheval was blocked by some major electrical works in the valley, closing off the return loop of the footpath back to town without warning. I photographed these forlorn decapitated branches cable-tied to the Heras. Do these unsettling symbols mark the places where the hedgerows were so they remain in memory to be regenerated? Do they stop the birds flying into the fencing? If anyone who works on these types of construction projects and can shed any light, I’m all ears.
01:01–03:25 (Untitled) And here is a harmonic oscillator playing a chain of sequences inspired by the above.
03:28 Calamitous revving sounds emerge from the copicopicopicat: a beastly modified tape delay with 16 heads recorded while chewing its way through a session at This Museum is (Not) Obsolete in Ramsgate on a brisk Sunday morning last December.
03:32 I positioned mics either side of a stream in Ty Canol wood in early spring this year. Ty Canol is a tiny scrap of temperate rainforest on a steep Pembrokeshire hillside: a rocky outcrop crammed full of stunted, gnarled oaks known as ‘air trees’; branches forming crooked witches’ fingers encrusted with jewels of vanishingly rare lichen, necks laden with strings of polypody ferns. Underfoot are fragglish boulders subsumed by thick layers of springy moss. It’s wet, wet, wet. (Although actually at the time I visited it was kind of alarmingly dry). I picked up a copy of The Lost Rainforests of Britain from the library so I could share some sage words about this type of fairly-recently-”discovered” ancient woodland habitat with you, but the quote that leapt out from its pages instead was
“amateur is often used disparagingly, to dismiss ignorance, but the root of the word is Latin for ‘love’.”
03:38–05:56 (Untitled) I devised some new sequences to improvise with at Dyski and Yarmonics in March. I made this recording before it all morphed into something else, which it already has.
05:12 A man in a hi-viz jacket (a ‘water quality testing engineer’ if I might hazard a guess at a job title) knocked on the door and asked if I would mind if he took some samples of the water coming out of our kitchen tap. He was furnished with a handheld device called a “Hach SL1000 Portable Parallel Analyser” that made dial-up modem grunting noises and sang a little song of victory every time a round of testing was complete. He didn’t mind me recording the sounds of the machine, and divulged that as a side hustle he ran an Instagram account about his travels. When all was concluded I asked, “Have we passed?”. He replied “If you hear from us again, you’ve got a problem”. So far we remain uncontacted by the Drinking Water Inspectorate.
06:18–08:15 (Untitled) More sounds from the museum: stunning earthy drones from Joan’s Organ, an enormous pipe organ that was first salvaged from a church in 1975 and then quite literally built into a tiny terraced house in Bristol. It now finds itself MIDI-compatible and living in Ramsgate.
07:03 Normally when you go into my local shop you’re followed round by ‘Co-Op Radio’, a breakdown-inducing combo of jangly pop and jolly-voiced adverts. I don’t know what happened last Sunday morning but I got the feeling that one of the staff had comandeered the playlist before the supervisor turned up.
07:09 It’s really great that Eventide has relaunched Laurie Speigel’s Music Mouse software for the modern home computer.
07:17 Tawny owls calling in the dark.
07:54 Here’s a respectfully tiny snippet of the clamour of Klinker Klub, hosted as ever by eccentric energetic octogenarian Hugh Metcalfe at Asylum Studios (the artists’ co-operative on an ex-air base where Truxalis has a space) on a freezing night some time this winter. I was clutching a mug of rooibos for warmth; wrapped in a calf-length polar coat, woolly hat under my hood, scarf across all exposed areas of face. I think only myself, Emma and Joel were in attendance, meaning equal numbers of audience to performers; the natural order of things for a free improv session.
08:17–11:26 A version of a new track I’ve made available in full to Cottage Studio subscribers under the title, “Nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power”. Yes, I am the invisible power and this twinkling modular synth is my cosmos!! This is a tricksy sequence as the offbeat keeps slipping away, the result of playing an odd-numbered melodic sequence over an even-numbered drum pattern. The finished mixdown has been finessed with a relaxing layer of dust (ie slowed down 10% using the GCS Model 8 emulator).
11:10 thethethe copicopicopicat’s roarroarroar
11:24–14:06 (Untitled) An array of tubular bells, glockenspiel, chrsoglott and vibraphone: all electromechanical instruments rescued from two sheds in a garden near Leeds (“Mr Stockdale’s Theatrone”), now lovingly restored, MIDI-fied and installed in the museum of anti-obsolescence. Clicks and whirrs from the telephone exchange room, and a bouncy kick sampled kick from an Analog Rytm.
13:57 Binaural rummaging. What would it sound like to be at the bottom of a cardboard box that’s underneath a huge pile of stuff dumped in the cupboard under the stairs? A pair of binaural microphone ears have joined the Cottage Studio and we need wonder no longer as you are listening to that very sound right now.
14:58 Since deciding to pull the Aym Mixtape together it hasn’t rained in these parts. I had to go back a full year in the archives to find this soft misty drizzle in the woods at Minsmere, and it occurred to me that since this recording was made there’ve been unimaginable changes to the landscape near there. For it seems, contrary to the declaratory signage heralding that “It’s Not Too Late!” to the passing traffic, there is in fact no stopping Sizewell C. Beloved slopes of wood pasture have been flattened to make way for three new roundabouts. Heras fencing for miles. Giant yellow generators chug away in cordons at intervals. Widened roads with laybys big enough for queues of articulated lorries laden with titanic pipes and structural supports to idle in as they wait for the all-clear to head further up the A12. Ancient oaks felled and hedgerows levelled from Yoxford to Leiston. Sorrow abounds.
15:31–18:41 (Untitled, but it may be called Hollow Roar.)
17:53 Breaking all the rules of cast-iron pan maintenance by dripping cold water onto sizzling hot metal.
20:45 The gentlest late winter waves lapping at a stone slipway under a midnight moon. The sloosh of a gyre forming at the alchemic angle where the slipway meets the quay somewhere in the Irish Sea rushes into one ear and drains out the other.
19:02–22:48 (Untitled) A new tune I’m working on that I’m pretty sure is going to end up being super fast and breaksy. Here’s a super stripped-back one-take jam of the sequence, sans percs, running at a fairly low bpm. I’ve had the Erica Synths Black Sequencer for nearly four years now and inevitably there are features I’m only just starting to dive into, one of them being to try setting up those independent “mod lanes” to send out additional voltages at different points along the sequence. This sequence uses CV programmed in this way to affect the harmonics of the Verbos Harmonic Oscillator at specific times in the sequence, dialling in different flavours to create the illusion of more ‘notes’. That hyper dreamy sprinkling of sugar in the high harmonic range is two of the ONA oscillators (triangle and saw) going through the Jove with lots of modulation.
20:06 There’s a second layer of texture in this piece that I recorded using the Fieldtone Weaver and added on afterwards in the DAW; the processed sounds of me snapping my fingers into the inbuilt mic on the front of the module. Hugh sent me a demo of the Eurorack model to test out aaages ago and I’ve been feeling guilty about holding onto it any longer. I emailed to say “I can’t do this!!” and, the second the pressure was off, I found my groove with it. It all came good once I stopped trying to get the module to do things it’s resolutely not designed for, and leant into the things it’s exceptionally capable at. I’m an agoniser (do I need to spell that out?) and it can be really hard for me to let go. Feeling utterly stuck and wanting to throw in the towel – in all walks of life, not just creativity – are signs that a breakthrough is right there for the taking if you’re prepared to identify (and relinquish if necessary) whatever Very Firm Belief is stopping you from making that leap forward!
22:55 Beautiful biinaural dawn chorus recorded on the ears last week, starring a wren and a blue-tit before a hedgeful of riotous sparrows arrive and take over the whole show. As I’m typing this I can hear a single song thrush singing its speckled throat out somewhere beyond the rooflight. I wish you could hear that as well.
23:19–31:04 (Untitled) Another sequence recorded in the week before Dyski and Yarmonics; you can maybe hear the relationship with the one at around 6 mins into this mixtape? This one starts out all kind of innocent and hopeful but soon enough an absolute slab of saw-wave sneaks up from below fit to burst out of the SEM filter. Low end from the Basilimus Iteras Alter (as all the sub in this mixtape is actually; I’m using it as a bass synth instead of a kickdrum now), ornamented by the electric zaps of a flock of starlings and another round of sounds from that restless impasto sea.
Thanks for listening. Go gently into this good Aym.
Loula Yorke 