Issue 2 / 26 January 2024
Electronic DIY goodness galore... Album Of The Week: Loula Yorke 'Volta' + Loula interview + new release round-up + Track Of The Week from Sonic Cathedral newbies Not Me But Us + more + more + more
Is it just me or was that a quick week? We had some very kind messages following our launch issue. Just got to do one every week now, but it’s not like there’s any shortage of great stuff to write about is there? I enjoyed the immediacy of the whole thing, there’s a nice rhythm to a weekly. Don’t know why, maybe it’s that a week is just enough time to digest everything. Daily is too fast, monthly is too slow.
I’d also like to say a big thank you to everyone who pledged their support, actual people who have committed to pay £££ for all this. It would be great to get Moonbuilding Weekly at least partly funded by readers. Just like the old days, eh? If that sounds like something you’d be up for, there’s a little button below where you can pledge.
You will no doubt have heard the awful news that music journalist Neil Kulkarni died suddenly this week. He was just 51. We knew each other from our days at Melody Maker where I was reviews editor and he was one of the main writers. I’ve said this a lot over the years, but the best music writers are the ones who are as obsessed with the words and the process as they are with whatever they’re writing about. You know which ones they are because their work leaps off the page. Neil’s work leapt off the page. He is a huge loss, not just as a writer but as a person. Safe travels old pal.
I hope you enjoy Issue 2.
Neil Mason, editor
moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
LOULA YORKE ‘Volta’ (Truxalis)
The first time Loula Yorke blipped on my radar was her Oram Awards win in 2020. At the time I called her “A DIY Noisnik Champion”, but that’s very much not what’s going with ‘Volta’, more of which in a minute. First we need a little look-see at how Loula got here. Her own travels through time and space says much about her work. And it’s been quite the trip.
Based in Suffolk these days, Loula only began dabbling with electronic music after the birth of her two children. Before all that, before the normality of school runs and packed lunches and swimming lessons, she was living in squats and raving.
Her new-found dabbling led to her forming TR-33N with her partner Dave Stitch. And what sort of music were they making? Like you even have to ask. So the pair went raving again, this time on the other side of the tracks.
Thing was, they didn’t do this the usual route, pushing sounds round a computer screen, they were hands-on, they improvised live at raves and using a modular set-up to boot. And then, during a hiatus in 2018, Loula went solo with ‘ysmysmysm’. Her 2019 debut album hadn’t fallen too far from the rave and was described as “a naturalistic Throbbing Gristle at their most uncompromising”.
And then, subtly, things began to shift. Improvisation remained at the heart of the “scratchy techno punk” and “modular witchery” of the ‘LDOLS’ (‘Last Day Of Little School’) which was followed by ‘YOUL’, a record drawn from her now daily modular synthesis practice. Everything seemed to come together around ‘Florescence’, her fourth solo outing, which landed just right for second issue of Moonbuilding. “Dazzlingly good” we said. “These tracks have real weight where they need it and a delicacy of touch when they don’t”. We talked about how Loula Yorke is a name that should be tripping off the tongue.
Well, that time has well and truly arrived with ‘Volta’. Here she takes a step away from the improvisation and into composition as she exerts a degree of control over her little boxes by adding a sequencer as she investigates the concept of cyclical time. While she might have cut her teeth in the glare of glow sticks this is something else entirely. There’s a a delicacy at work here that sets Loula apart. The opener, the brilliantly titled ‘It’s Been Decided That If You Lay Down No One Will Die’ is Aphex good. It has that same knack for melody. There’s nothing complex here, nothing difficult. It just feels like pure sound.
There are rules for all this, of course – her palette is restricted to a single set of modules, there’s no granular synthesis, no vocals, no drums. Loula says they were inspired by the “celestial meditations” of Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel and Caterina Barbieri, her aim to create “luminous sonic tessellations”. Patterns within patterns within patterns as the sequences slowly open up and, in her words “eat each other”.
There’s such skill on show and such beauty within these seven works. ‘The Grounds Are Changing As They Promise To Do’ sounds as the title suggests as it subtly shifts to its crescendo before melting slowly away. ‘Stay With The Trouble’ is especially good, its subby rumbles adding the merest hint of the dancefloor while the rich melody swells and grows. ‘An Example of Periodic Time’ is the most frantic track here, the most tense, but all the while it holds itself tight, taut, not letting anything drift out of place.
From her captivating live performances to the sounds she wrangles from the electricity coursing through her machines, what Loula Yorke does is very special. And here she hits the motherlode. Everything is precisely worked out over sustained periods of composition before finally the piece can be recorded live, no editing, no reconstruction, just one take of her unique vision. And what a vision. You get the feeling that ‘Volta’ is just the beginning. Let’s watch her fly. (NM)
‘Volta’ is out now via loulayorke.bandcamp.com or at Boomkat who also have copies of the sought-after limited edition cassette
VOLUME ONE>ISSUE TWO: LOULA YORKE
Drum roll please for the Oram Award-winning, Suffolk-dwelling, flower-picking, modular synth-loving January sceptic and the owner of the best fringe in electronic music since, well, Richie Hawtin probably, it’s the very brilliant Ms Loula Yorke…
Interview: Neil Mason
Image: Loula Yorke
Hello Loula, how’s things? January eh? Not many people’s favourite month. How are you with January?
“Not loving it, to be fair. I really don’t get on with the lack of light at this time of year, plus it’s hard to thrive in the cold.”
Thanks for brightening our day with your new record. Tell us about ‘Volta’...
“It’s an album I wrote last summer where I used a sequencer for the first time in my modular system. I wanted to create fixed patterns that moved through cycles rather than relying on live improvisation. The album is me thinking about cyclical time, a deeper, more ancient time found in seasons and ecosystems and life cycles. I was thinking about making sonic tessellations, repeating patterns that fit together to reveal even bigger geometries, as well as circles and cycles and iteration.”
Where does the title ‘Volta’ come from?
“The name has so many references in it – I’m giving a nod to the language I use to compose, which is control voltage, volts are named in honour of Alessandro Volta; to the word in literature meaning a rhetorical turn or a change, which references my change in approach from improv to composition; to one of the Italian words for ‘time’ used in the sense of ‘this time” or ‘next time’, which to me implies it will come around again, time as a moment in a cycle rather as a linear journey and a fixed destination.”
You describe the album as “luminous”, which it very much is. How come?
“I wanted to make something that shines out and use sounds with a lot of clarity that bounce around and brighten the corners like light does. I wanted to make music that glows like a beacon.”
Love the track titles – ‘It’s Been Decided That If You Lay Down No One Will Die’ is brilliant. It’s a line from a poem by mythopoet Robert Bly?
“It’s from a poem about giving yourself permission to stop when you feel absolutely overwhelmed. You don’t have to add to the pressure. It’s not all on your shoulders. Take a minute. The world won’t stop turning. I was unsure about this title in some ways as I didn’t want it to be interpreted as a demotivator or as a cop-out, because there are times we do need to dig into our reserves and keep fighting for what we believe in even if it would be more comfortable to disengage. But then again it’s still not helpful if you’re suffering burn-out.”
Your social media performances and live shows are utterly captivating - what it is that appeals about watching someone wrangle electricity?
“I honestly don’t know! I hope people are reacting positively to the combination of the music and the energy I’m bringing. Personally I love the aesthetics of a modular synthesiser with all the coloured patch cables and knobs. It’s the ‘mad scientist’ vibe.”
How important is having a good space when you’re creating?
“I don’t know – for a lot of people they can make anywhere, on the tube, on the top of a mountain. I’m only bound to a single space by the amount of hardware equipment I use, I guess. What I call my studio is in fact a shared workspace with the rest of the family so I have to be able to pack down and move my modular on the turn of a dime, which is good practice for playing live. For me, having a space at home is what’s important. It needs to be somewhere warm if possible, with lots of daylight. I like the plywood panelling in my studio, it’s really calming.”
The flowers are always such a nice touch in your videos. Do you pick them fresh yourself?
“Thanks! They are all from my cottage garden, which is just visible through the door of the studio. Whatever is in bloom goes in a jar or a glass milk bottle. Some of my favourite plants only flower for a couple of weeks a year and I want to savour them. Getting some of each onto my desk means I can drink them in, I feel nourished by the sight of them somehow.”
You spent years playing live in rave duo TR-33N. You must have some good tales from those days?
“I have a lot of good tales, but I haven’t worked out how to tell them yet. Good storytelling is a gift and I want to do them justice.”
How do your rave skills help your work today?
“I definitely pay homage to my rave background when I play live. I close my sets with big kick drums, stuttering distorted hats through a dub delay, and chopped and screwed speech. I think the swirling euphoric polyrhythms of my melodic, ‘beatless’ music also goes pretty hard. It’s all geared towards losing yourself, being lifted up, being connected, being changed by the experience of listening to music.”
I first came across you thanks to the Oram Awards. That’s an amazing organisation isn’t it? What has their recognition done for you?
“For sure they’re great. They are building a really stellar network of women. Their recognition has really helped me to situate my work as a tech-focused musician and a sonic experimentalist.”
You’re no stranger to empowering young girls when it comes to electronic music, tell me about your work there…
“It’s really close to my heart. It’s about that exciting moment when these disparate components come together, fire up and start buzzing. It’s so unlikely and it gives you a real lift. I am always keen to share that feeling. I ran a sound arts project for girls for a couple of years called Atari Punk Girls where we soldered little noise synths, simple square wave oscillators, and had a go at performing with them. I’m happier working with digital music tools in workshops, which I’m doing currently, just because it’s a lot less stressful for me as a facilitator if no one can burn themselves on a soldier iron. And there’s fewer barriers to entry in terms of concentration spans or motor skills.”
It feels to me that you’re building a proper head of steam. Where do you want to go with all this? What’s the dream?
“I just want to keep learning and practicing, making music, playing live, and releasing the sounds I love. I’d like to have an audience who want to hear what I’m up to and are happy to support me to keep going. I have an email newsletter I send out if anyone’s interested in staying in touch. I think of it like sending out a creative journal entry, a dose of brain food, something for folks to chew on and hopefully connect with on their own creative life journeys.”
Thanks for quoting Moonbuilding in your press release. We said you were “dazzingly good”. Can our quote be at the top next time please, it’s way better than the other two isn’t it?
“Thanks so much for your continued support, it means a lot. I think your readers are probably my perfect listeners!”
You can sign up for Loula’s newsletter here. While you’re at it, why not watch her new video for ‘Staying With The Trouble’…
NOT ME BUT US ‘When We See’ (Sonic Cathedral)
The first single from ‘Two’, the forthcoming debut long-player from the Italian duo of composer/multi-instrumentalist Bruno Bavota and Fabrizio Somma who is better known as K-Conjog. Nat at Sonic Cathedral says they combine ambient, techno, 2000s club culture, post-classical and post-rock, which, you know, is a pretty broad church. He’s not wrong though as you’ll discover when you clap ears on the album, which is out on 22 March. It’s one of those records that feels properly uplifting, and we can all do with a bit of that at this time of the year.
With its trancey chords, floaty choral vocal and rich, sweeping arpeggios, ‘When We See’ is kind of Chicane meets Orbital meets Ulrich Schnauss… not heard anything in a while from young Ulrich have we? Must be due a release, right? Oh and nice to see Orbital reissuing ‘The Green Album’ in April. Looks like a bumper package *licks lips*. Anyway, enjoy…
Got an upcoming release? Send it our way. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
GOOD STUFF #1
STELLARAYS ‘Winter Resort Music’ (Castles In Space)
In any other week ‘Winter Resort Music’ would have been a shoo-in for Album Of The Week, but you can’t ignore that Loula Yorke album. Let’s call it a close second. The theme for this third album from the trio comes from a childhood passion for winter sports, which is rich for a band from Portugal. But that’s Stellarays for you. “It’s all about the spooky synths, mainlining radiophonic electronics, subconscious TV memories and an awe about what these athletes could do on the slopes when you were living in the suburbs” froths the press blurb. Who writes this stuff? They should write for us. ‘Winter Resort Music’ is great stuff, all library all of the time. Stellarays make music that happily exists in a place that looks like ours, but is a bit on the wonk, not quite what it should be. As a result, tracks such as the warm Bontempi-like rumble of ‘Cocktail Alpina’ or mellow plinks and plonks of ‘The Chalet Cafeteria’ (love these titles) carry an unearthly yet very pleasing weight to them. Tragically, this is also a posthumous release as the band lost Bruno Sousa last year, aged just 50. He leaves behind a trio of releases to be very proud of.
GOOD STUFF #2
VARIOUS ARTISTS ‘TfL Vol 1’ (Moolakii Club)
Really like what Jez Thelwell is doing up in the Wirral with his Moolakii Club Audio Interface label. It’s one of those ventures you have to spend a bit time rummaging around in to work out what’s what. There’s a very cute zine, a proper zine, printer paper, staples and everything. And they’re branching out with live events, the debut outing is Moolaki Club Live Showcase, an all-dayer in Birkenhead on 24 February starring Lo Five, Audio Obscura and Jez’s musical alter ego Loopatronica among others. Looks great and £6 too. Tickets are at skiddle.com/g/moolakiiclubai
Anyway, compiled by Chris “Bone Music” Bullock (also on the bill at the above), ‘TfL Vol 1’ is indeed a tribute album to Transport For London. Created around field recordings made on the capital’s transport system and with proceeds going to homeless charity Centrepoint [centrepoint.org.uk] it’s a rewarding and worthwhile listen. Love the rhythmic rumble of The Both And’s ‘Overland’ and the four/four of Looptronica’s ‘Bakerloo Line’. There’s a fair few artists here who I’m discovering for the first time here like Simon Heartfield whose ‘Unfolding’ uses that squealing noise tube trains make feels pretty menacing. I can recommend listening to ‘TfL Vol 1’ while using transport in London. Makes for an interesting experience.
moolakiiclubaudiointerface.bandcamp.com
GOOD STUFF #3
COLIN NEWMAN ‘Bastard’ (Swim~)
The Wire frontman reissues his debut and, remarkably, his only solo album from 1997. It comes here for the first time on vinyl and on double CD with a dozen bonus tracks. Best form an orderly queue because it is brilliant. It’s a world away from the music of the mothership, but that was the whole point.
The Newmans were light years ahead. Listening now, much of this could’ve come out this week, let alone three decades ago. The melodic drum and bass of ‘Slowfast’ would have sat happily in a LTJ Bukam set, but as is pointed out in the press bumpf, dance music artists back then didn’t mix up styles like this. So it’s followed by ‘Without’, a kind of ambient folktronica sort of track, which is followed by the four-to-the-floor funky house of ‘G-Deep’. People
I loved the Swim~ label at the time of this release, still do, but back then it really felt like a label doing things right. There were a couple of label samplers, early 00s, called ‘Swim Team’ that were really great. They featured tracks by the Wire family - Malka Spigel (Mrs Newman), Immersion (Colin and Malka), Bumpy (Colin and their son Ben) along with the likes of Danish shoegazers Silo and Ronnie And Clyde, which is my old pal Rob and his pal Ronnie… John, and so much more. Some of the tracks on the ‘Bastard’ bonus disc are drawn from those comps. Just looked and for a couple of quid you can get both ‘Swim Team’ comps on Discogs. Bargain.
GOOD STUFF #4
A quick rattle through some other stuff out today? Righto.
Letters From Mouse’s ‘Clota’ is a first offering of the year from Dan Saville’s mighty SubExotic label. Released on Burn’s Night Boxing Day (oh you know, the day after Burn’s Night), it sees Steven “Letters From Mouse” Anderson paying a modular tribute to Clota, who in Celtic mythology was the goddess of the River Clyde, a not unimportant waterway in the grand scheme of things.
The rather fancily titled Alexander R Cargill Esq serves up ‘Bromham’ on Woodford Halse. Mr Cargill is actually The Central Office Of Information, which should tell you much of what you need to know about this release.
Mortality Tables has roared into 2024. A release last week and another one today, this time from Maps who serves up a track, ‘A 4’33” Walk To Woburn Sands Station’, as part of the Lifefiles series (LF15 for those keeping count). You’ll be pleased to hear it’s a full-blown, euphoric Maps offering that really doesn’t disappoint.
Mark Van Hoen’s ‘Plan For A Miracle’ (Dell'Orso) is a rather beautiful piece of work. He’s an interesting chap is Mark - Signed to R&S in the early 90s, he was a founding member of Seefeel. You might know him as Locust or perhaps as a member of Sing-Sing with Emma Anderson. Interestingly, his people say there’s been a recent collaboration with members of Slowdive. Anyway, this is his first solo outing since 2018’s ‘Invisible Threads’ on Touch. It’s a collection of very gentle work, with each piece recorded somewhere different with different set-ups. And then you discover it’s all born out of the tragic loss his wife, which gives the release a very poignant weight.
…BONUS REVIEW
For various reasons, this album should have been reviewed in the last issue of Moonbuilding. It wasn’t, but here’s the review now in all its glory. And exactly on release day too...
SALVATORE MERCANTANTE ‘Ø’ (ASIP)
Describing the music of New York’s Salvatore Mercatante as minimalist somehow doesn’t do it justice. His structures contain all the essential, vital, energising components of electro and techno, but it’s almost as if those elements have been separated and rearranged into discrete, isolated patterns, like an especially abstracted painting by Kandinsky.
‘Ø’ is undoubtedly an album of two halves. The first five tracks operate with an extreme fragility. Key track ‘Moon’ is so ephemeral that it might only exist at the fringes of your imagination with tiny static sounds approximating a Geiger counter picking up the faintest background radiation. Clusters of electro-symphonic strings emerge slowly from the depths, a signature motif that also appears on the suppressed, slow-motion techno of ‘Old Peels’. Rather than feeling euphoric or uplifting those string sounds feel empty and hollow, even as they wrap themselves around you with quiet, patient grace.
Things coalesce and harden in the album’s second half. ‘Atac’ contains a crisp and bold jacking electro rhythm and a increased sense of momentum, its beat progressively firming up as it progresses. It is still ultra-minimal, with a haunting drone and occasional bass pulse being the only other discernible element. ‘Narcotics’ begins with percussion that might be the sampled sound of a gravedigger trying to crack open frozen ground. Noxious clouds of grim texture presage a razor-sharp grid of relentless, clattering beats reminiscent of Photek, if most of the layered detail was erased.
The highlight here is ‘Many Hands’, which deploys skeletal 808-style beats offering a pronounced, body-moving physicality. There’s a bass framework with a stalking, predatory quality reminiscent of a deconstructed Nitzer Ebb or Recoil. Even though it is fully atomised, ‘Many Hands’ might be the most complete track here - there is an outline of a melody, a semblance of completeness, and a more overt structure.
These tracks are strangely affecting, leaving you feeling ever-so-slightly off-balance. More than anything, they highlight the unique and persuasive reductivist talents of Mercatante. Kandinsky would definitely approve. Mat Smith
astrangelyisolatedplace.bandcamp.com
THE TAPE CRUSADER
Will you look at that, cassettes again! This week it’s not a player, it’s a book. Marc Masters’ ‘High Bias: The Distorted History Of The Cassette Tape’, which snuck out last autumn on US imprint University Of North Carolina Press, is a real treat. This sort of thing can often be a bit, well, dry, but Marc - a former Pitchfork staffer who has written for Bandcamp Daily, NPR, Rolling Stone etc - whistles jauntily through this, the history of the cassette.
Sure, there’s much nostalgia attached to the format, but there’s little denying how crucial they were for disseminating music in the pre-online world. I was obsessed with live bootlegs in my teenage years so Chapter 4 which covers these illicit recordings is great. There’s some excellent stuff in the chapter about how cassettes helped launch movements, especially when it came to the nascent hip hop scene in New York. The final chapter, ‘Tapes’s Not Dead’, is a broad sweep of the tape world today.
Best of all, if you buy the book directly from the author via his Bandcamp page, it’ll come signed with its very own cassette featuring 12 tracks from 12 contemporary cassette labels he talks about in the book among them Hausu Mountain, Strategic Tape Reserve et al. Not much from UK but sure Marc will be dragged into our world very shortly. Looks like there’s EIGHT copies of the book/cassette bundle left. Chop chop.
This is one of those books you’re going eat up in a couple of sittings. I notice that Marc has also written a long out of print book about No Wave. Would love to see a reissue of that if any publishers are reading.
THEY WALK AMONG US
If you’re wandering along London’s South Bank TONIGHT (26 January) wondering what do with yourself, you are in luck. You’d be wise to catch ‘The Anatomy Of An Orchestra: Drone Refractions’, an unmissable show in The Clore Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall starring Charles Hazelwood and the Paraorchestra performing honkers from the minimalist canon. There’s a gag to be had there about firing and cannons/canons, it’ll come to me at some point, no doubt far too late.
Anyway, the Paraorchestra have done this sort of thing before and it’s incredible. The musicians are spread around the space and the audience can move among them as they play, which is where the anatomy of the orchestra comes in. So if you want to know what it sounds like standing in the middle of an orchestra, well, here you go.
This a brand-new show, the premier of which was in Bristol last night, and sees the orchestra performing three pieces opening with ‘Straylight’, a brand-new work by Paraorchestra trustee Rylan Gleave that draws on John Cage’s ‘Seventy Four’. It’s followed by a new arrangement of Pauline Olivero’s ‘The Last Time/Ultima Vez’ by Charlotte Harding featuring vocalist Victoria Oruwari and the whole shebang is capped off with a performance of ‘Fratres’ by minimalist maestro, Arvo Part. There’s two shows, 7pm and 9pm, but it looks like the early doors one is sold out. As I type there are still tickets for the later offering though.
IRON AWE
Gawd, I love Liverpool-based design house Dorothy. I’ve had the first edition of their Electric Love blueprint on my wall for years. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve traced the lines looking for connections while working on a review or feature. I also have various posters rolled up in tubes just waiting for the wall space. I can’t help notice they’ve got new line – iron-on patches. I know right. The Musical Space Patches are available individually or as sets. Based on space-related songs (‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, ‘Life on Mars?’, ‘Venus As A Boy’, oh you get the idea), they come mounted on backing card ready for framing or they can be removed for ironing onto your denim jacket. Or, as the good folk at Dorothy correctly point out, your favourite spacesuit. Oh, there’s a set of Bowie Space Patches, which we suspect might be a bit popular.
A MESSAGE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP
The current issue is available from moonbuilding.bandcamp.com and it’s full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover we have star-in-the-making Maria Uzor, we profile label-of-the-moment quiet details, there’s an incredible interview with Captain Star creator Steven Appleby, and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp gets busy with our There’s A First Time For Everything questions.
We review a big pile of releases from labels including Castles In Space, Woodford Halse, Persistence Of Sound, Assai, Ahora, DiN, Werra Foxma, Ghost Box and many more. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the world-famous Captain Star cartoon strip, which you will know all about once you’ve read the incredible feature with creator Steven Appleby.
This issue’s CD is ‘The Moonbuilding Miscellany - Volume One’, which is put together by CiS supremo Colin Morrison. It’s a belter featuring tracks from the likes of Lo Five, Lone Bison, Twilight Sequence, Ojn, NCHX and more, have a listen below…
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
Copyright © 2024 Moonbuilding