Florescence

Florescence is the fourth solo album from UK-based synthesist, Loula Yorke. Created from improvisations recorded between January and May 2022 – the growing season of the wildflower meadow outside her window in Suffolk – the album explores a cyclical, creative and expansive interpretation of time, holding up a mirror to life as a mother: the stillness of winter, the drama of budding, the joy of unfurling, and the bittersweet sadness that comes with the arising and passing of stages along the journey.

Over 50 minutes Florescence is an exploration of music as mass: time moves in circles, unfolding and crashing back into itself, causing shifting perspectives of meter and pattern; creating a dense dark forest or an elevated heartbeat; asking, ‘how much does air weigh’? The album is full of fizzy, trance-inducing wonkiness, from contrapuntal experiments to geometric acid waves: one moment could be a nod to the breakcore that soundtracked Loula’s formative years, another could be to Xenakis or Bach.

“For this record I wanted to improvise synthetic atmospheres of abundance and bursting forth – tumbling, cascading, things developing, rich and full. But running as an undercurrent there is a sense of loss; each track is named after a flowering plant that grows wild: once-common words and images rise to meet me from a critically endangered landscape. The hand-drawn cover art by Vik Winter feeds into this idea of natural forms coming up against the industrial and technological. The connections she makes in her drawings are exactly how I imagine the inside of my head! I feel completely at home in them.” (Loula Yorke)

TRACK LIST