1st March 2025
Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics
00’00 A buzzard calls, wheeling through the sky above the Blyth estuary. I’m following the path of an old railway line along a stretch of marsh known as the Heronry, woodland on one side of me and a wide expanse of wetland on the other. Once you realise you’re on a trainline the topography makes sense, how it came to be that the path you’re on is exactly 3 feet wide and practically flat, how it seems at points to be carved into a bank that rises to one side. Later investigations reveal it was a slow train, covering 8 and 3/4 miles at 16 mph, the journey took 35 minutes. So leisurely was its pace that “there was ample opportunity for poaching en route. Walter Day, a plateman, was prosecuted in 1884 for setting snares and taking hares.”
As the importance of the harbour at Southwold declined in favour of Lowestoft to the north, so did the need for a railway line. The arrival of an omnibus company was the last straw and the line closed for good in 1929.
00’47 I stray from the path and step out a little way into the reeds to listen to the waterbirds. I hear the roar of chainsaws and the rumble of traffic on the A12. Above me in the trees, a wren and a blue tit call the alarm. I spy a moss-covered hollow in the bank, the skeleton of a tree stump, and wonder who lives in a house like that?
Back on the beaten track, sharp-needled spikes of gorse slide across polyester in time with my steps.
01’44 My feet are having fun in the mud on the path.
01’50 The Yorke Talke Theeme Tunee Deconstructed. I’ve had such a painful time trying to make this track work that in the end I’ve given up and put it through the masher. It’s been a breakbeat tune, it’s been an ambient tune, it’s been 3 minutes long, it’s been 6 minutes long, it’s been deadly serious, it’s been played for laughs. Time to step away! Anyway, you might recognise it as the opening strains of the Yorke Talk podcast.
03’48 Water rushes into a deep ditch from a drainage pipe in the field across the road from the cottage. My feet crunch through leaves. Spikes of time create sharp frequency shifts.
In a hedge separating a row of mews houses from the Bethnal Green Road, the disappeared sparrows of London are out in force. Their excitable little shrieks bounce sharply off the brickwork. Water continues to gush. The Yorke Talke Theeme Tunee has been stretched beyond all recognition; what’s left hangs in the air like mist, glistens like dewdrops in a spiderweb.
06’50 Out from the whorls, emerges Untitled #29, a work in progress. Come and be subsumed by sounds! Enveloped by undulations! Waves upon waves upon waves! High drama. I felt it worth sharing where I’d got to with this one before it shapeshifts beyond recognition, lost to the wind.
11’55 Back at home, moving between the sink and the dishwasher, water gurgles, cutlery clatters and ceramic bowls ring out.
Untitled #30. I can’t find the words for this one so I’ll just say I revisited Burial’s album Untrue earlier this month and this broken, dusty spirit leaked out. That, and clanging utensils.
[A little sidebar for the music production enthusiasts. I’m really enjoying this hybrid workflow of live modular and DAW post-production I’ve got going at the moment. As before, everything is recorded live in one take to the SD card on my mixing desk, but now the percussion is split out into lots of different channels. This means I can focus on playing the synths and the delays live in the moment, which is good because they still all feed into one stereo channel and so can’t be separated out and easily edited later. Nothing sits on the grid in the DAW when I pull it in off the card, but it doesn’t matter because the percussion was all recorded at the same time as the synths, to the same clock, and so I know that as long as I line up the files properly, then whatever rhythms appear will be in sync, ready for me to develop at my leisure after the session.]
19’15 Out in the garden chopping back dead foliage from a mountain of last year’s asters, a gift from M last spring, a thuggish lot that had taken over her vegetable patch. I leave all the seedheads and stems over winter to make cover for the ground and habitat for whoever needs it, but now spring calls, green shoots are emerging, and my aesthetic gardening sensibilities are awakening from their darkday-slumber. Cars pass. Birds sing.
Though the weather oscillates chaotically between sun, drizzle and snow, the ever-increasing amount of daylight can’t lie. The trajectory feels clear.
Back out in the field a different pipe issues forth a trickle, rather than a steady stream, into a drainage ditch. A helicopter passes overhead. A lady is walking a german shepherd and I try to diverge from her path so we’re not engaging in this awkward dance, first following, then pursuing and finally overtaking, as I repeatedly stop to record and then catch up. She might be wondering what I’m doing. The dog might want to get involved. It would be easier if I were alone.
When I get home I notice the grape hyacinth that grows in the gravel along the south-facing wall of the cottage has blossomed and is covered in bees, so I record those too.
The kettle goes on, my feet shift around the kitchen floor. Rosie asks to be fed and her snuffles into the microphone becomes a rhythm. Some low-end frequency-modulated rumbling from the synths. The kettle crescendoes, metal discs separating, a familiar automatic click.
23’56 Tapping the body of a tuned tongue drum, a chord is created from the coincidence of its resonance, bringing the sound of a vibraphone to mind. Its sounds are flipped, repeated, time-shifted. A speaker cone picks up cell phone signal. A knackered office chair goes through its motions.
24’20 And out from the pops and clicks of an envelope against a filter comes Untitled #27B. One final cosmic tessellation-in-progress to send us into the coming light. St Brigid hands over to St David.
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus
27’46 End.
Loula Yorke 