Loula Yorke: From London Squats to Rural Suffolk

An in-depth conversation with the UK composer and synthesist

Loula Yorke is sitting in a shed next to her house in Suffolk, which she calls her “Cottage Studio”. It’s one of the hottest days of the year, and she’s covered her synthesizers, so that they don’t melt in the heat.

The composer and modular synthesist has deep roots in the UK rave and squat scene. She’s been making and releasing music for a number of years, first as part of the group TR-33N, and then as a solo artist; but it wasn’t until 2024’s brilliant album Volta that her work received wider attention and acclaim from the music press.

That positive response seems to have boosted Yorke’s creativity. After releasing a monthly mixtape of original material and field recordings for a year, she’s recently compiled the best moments for two 30-minute sound collages, released together with a liner notes zine as The Book of Commonplace.

She’s also finished the actual successor to Volta, a full new album called Time is a Succession of Such Shapes. It’s turned into a rich emotional journey from wistful melancholy to giddy cheerfulness, and kind of a love letter to the modular synthesizer. Her stylistic influences range from minimalist composer Annea Lockwood and synth pioneer Laurie Spiegel to electronic musician peers like Caterina Barbieri.

This is not an ambient album – at least not in the passive listening sense. “Each sound feels cultivated, not programmed”, the press blurb says. “Nothing is excess. Everything hums. Time is a Succession of Such Shapes listens like a shifting grid of attention. Intimate, quietly alive, and shaped by the slow pull of time.”

I spoke to Loula Yorke about her upbringing in rural Ireland, her squatting days in London, retreating to the Suffolk countryside, parenting and discovering her true calling.

Loula Yorke

Loula, what are some of your earliest memories of sound?

The first thing that I remember pricking my ears up was hearing voices on the radio – just talk radio, regular daily programming, but that kind of timbre where there's no bottom end, and it's quite clear, and the voices sound calming, soothing and intimate. Back in the 1980s, people on the radio seemed quite wise. I don't know what talk radio is like now, probably the opposite.

What kind of music did your parents play at home?

They’ve had pretty standard pop sensibilities. The two records that I remember learning to work the cassette player to put on myself were Cat Stephens’ Tea For The Tillerman, and Abba’s Super Trouper. I lived in the middle of nowhere in Ireland, and I was living vicariously through the concept of being on stage and getting all the attention, because that album situated the performer as this big star – sort of a misguided understanding of what being a musician is.

Did anyone play music in your environment?

Irish traditional music was everywhere, so I had that sensibility baked in without having to think about it. My mum sang in a choir. She’d play things like Mozart's mass in C minor – very high-blown, emotional choral music. I also had a few piano lessons as a kid. We didn't have a piano at home, so I was trying to practice in the church hall, but wasn’t organized enough to do so. I used to turn up to the lessons never having had any practice, and the teacher got frustrated with me. I remember just faking illnesses because I hadn't practiced. It was this terrible shame.

As a teenager, I picked up the guitar after listening to PJ Harvey, The Breeders and L7. I desperately wanted to make music to express myself emotionally, but again, I was utterly useless at it. I simply couldn't understand how to do it. Music making always felt like something that was out of reach, something I could never comprehend or manage.

Then you moved to London at one point, right?

Yeah, I would study social anthropology, and I basically lived in squats. In the early 2000s, lots of creative people around me were making breakcore, but I wasn't doing it myself. At one point, I was living in a squat in Barcelona, and someone let me have a go on some kind of hardware sampler. Until then, I’d mainly been engaging with music as a fan and a listener, on the dancefloor, and I’d been trying to make music on a computer. But it was just this empty box and I didn't understand how to get music into it. The minute I had a hardware thing, I felt that there's some sound in there already, so now I've got some foundation to work on from. That was a real turning point.

You’re a late bloomer then. I believe we need to normalize that.

I actually started making music after my eldest daughter was born. I was in my early 30s. There's a thing about parenthood, motherhood especially, where you don't have an identity anymore. You’re talking to a baby all day, and you have no time either. Doing this thing that I'd been talking about and thinking about doing for all my life became really imperative, and a way for me to reformulate my identity as a human being, as a new person who is a musician. It took the birth of two children to make me understand that it's important for me to live my truth. It's actually hilarious when you think back about all the years of ‘wasted’ time, but it took a narrowing of everything into an absolutely tiny space for me to go.

You mentioned living in squats in London and Barcelona, now you’re in a country cottage in Suffolk… I get the sense that you feel drawn to alternative lifestyles.

100 percent. I was always just like, “I have to get out of here.” I came of age when lots of people were literally living in trees, protesting against road-building, and at the same time, those communities would have soundsystems, so there was a clear link between electronic music and political protest. Those raves and free parties were about creating a new world and a new identity, moving society into something kinder and more communal. Coming together on the dancefloor, but also saving the environment – there was always that tension between those two things. Are we here for political reasons, or because we want to party, and what's the give and take with that? Which can't ever be resolved, you know.

I agree, but I also feel that has changed a lot, if you look at the landscape today, especially in dance music.

Yeah, the monetization into a pure capitalist art form of mega clubs and DJs being paid 200 grand for a set or whatever, that’s where we are now. It’s ridiculous.

You mentioned being into PJ Harvey, The Breeders and L7 in your teens. How did you then get into electronic music?

At the same time as I was hopelessly bashing away at the guitar, my cousin gave me two tapes that were so foundational and important, which were Orbital’s Brown Album [Orbital 2, 1993] and The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld [1991]. I was 12 or 13 and totally addicted to those tapes. There wasn’t much of a contradiction between those things. It all felt like it was equally part of the culture. Obviously there was also hardcore and jungle going on at the time… you know, someone’s sister would give you the most amazing tapes of pirate radio stations, and they would have 15 different hardcore remixes of [The Beloved’s] “Sweet Harmony”.

When did you make that leap from the city to the countryside?

I was squatting for a number of years, and then I lived in a van and in a bus, traveling around Europe. Coming back to London, the bus was just too big, it wouldn't go down any of the streets. Also, we were living in yards outside squats, but we'd been getting further and further outside London. In the early days, it was easy to squat in Central London. We actually had one by Liverpool Street Station in Shoreditch. By the end, we were living in Arnos Grove, out in Zone 5. So we were pushed out, which is a natural thing that happens with gentrification, that's just how it works. In the summer of 2006, I couldn't do it anymore. We drove to a field in Suffolk to a friend's garden and put the bus there, so now I lived in a bus in a field. That was when I started thinking, “Maybe we need a house.” So we ended up renting and eventually buying this cottage, and this is where we still live.

You were in a band with your partner at the time, right?

That was a bit later, around 2010. I came around from literally breastfeeding a baby, and I was saying to Dave [Stitch], we have to be a dual live set, and it has to be on hardware, because it's all I can understand. That was called TR-33N and we did that for some years. We’d been part of the UK rave scene that morphed into the festival scene; as raves got more legislated and people got older, they turned their hands to putting on events that are actually licensed, like proper festivals. So we have quite deep connections with a lot of the older festivals, and there's always a little place for us in Glastonbury, in what used to be the travelers field. We ended up playing there in 2015 and 2016, which was actually our last gig. I went out on a high, left music alone for some time, and then decided to do solo stuff about 2018.

It’s been a huge learning curve. When you're in a band, you can slack off a bit. When it's just you, it's a good pivotal thing to up your craft. When I was in the band, I didn't necessarily understand what was going on technically all the time, and I felt quite limited by that. I really wanted to understand music technology and everything that it could do, and I felt that on my own was going to be a better way to do that.

photo: Sophie le Roux

When and how did you get into modular synthesizers?

I got into modular around the same time through necessity, because my Korg ESX sampler broke. My partner had some modules knocking around from a producer in Bristol called Blackmass Plastics [ed. note: who sadly passed away in July 2025]. He'd been making all these DIY modules, and he was just giving them to us. My setup for a few years was just this weird hollowed out log full of modules, and my [Roland] TR-09. It was a fully improvised thing, and it was terrifying, because I never knew what was going to come out of it – a load of random modules that I didn't understand how they work. After some time, I was sick of not knowing what was going to come out, so I wanted to learn to write my own music.

How did you approach that?

I did a lot of catching up on music theory and research into algorithmic music. With the modules I was using something called a Turing machine, like an analog shift register. You put a quantizer onto it, and it's making little loops, and then that's being quantized into little melodies. It sounded like music, but it wasn’t my music. I didn’t actually write it, so in 2022, I bought an actual proper sequencer.

For [my 2024 album] Volta, what I’d do was I'd write a really long sequence, send some of the parts out to other synths, so that one sequence is being split between different voices. Then I realized that it is like a monophonic Baroque thing. If you look at sheet music from the 1600s, nobody ever plays a chord. Chordal music didn’t even exist back then, it was all monophonic stuff. Turns out I was making music like they did 400 years ago. (laughs)

Experimental music seems to be a lot about going back to pre-classical, early music ideas, rediscovering all these concepts from a time before people were using equal temperament and chords.

Right, it’s almost like at one point they discovered chords and were like, “Oh my god, chords.” (laughs) So that was the next 400 years of music history, and we forgot all the rest. The oldest form of music is drone. There’s just one note, and you're hearing all these overtones, undertones… You can get lost in that for hours.

Volta received extremely positive responses from the press and the listeners. Did you expect that? How did that feel?

I was really happy, because I worked so hard on it. It was time that I put out something really good. I think it's important to put things out, even if you're not sure of them, especially if you live on your own in the middle of nowhere, like I do, and you don't get any feedback, so you never commit to anything and you never learn anything. I had to put out a lot of experiments, but with Volta, I genuinely felt it had serious merit. I was incredibly happy with the response, because I think it matched the fact that I had actually sorted my craft out enough.

What does your daily routine in the studio look like?

Well, I had a creative practice which has just come to a close. I decided to release something every month, to be recording and composing all the time. I’d turn on the machine just before I’d leave to take the children to school. When I came back, they'd be warmed up, tuned and ready to go. Then I just tried to get little sequences together and work out from there. I never intentionally tried to write songs, or even write music particularly. The sequencer just keeps going round and round until I tell it to go the other way or up or down or whatever. My creative practice is probably exhausting to listen to. (laughs)

That's the composition side, and then wanting to bring my life into it, I’m field recording at home, in the house, outside, when I go places, and trying to make these tapestries or collages of sounds that I would release every month. Some of those experiments were good, and they have gone onto this album, The Book of Commonplace. All of that music was on various mixtapes, it’s a year's worth of work. I'd write about the things that had happened as well – little creative vignettes that went with the sounds.

During the production, you also worked on your newest album Time is a Succession of Such Shapes, right?

Yeah, it was a solid year of creation. I've sold out all the tapes and the zines I did for The Book of Commonplace, but I'm going to add it as the bonus CD to Time is a Succession of Such Shapes. It’s going to be a double CD now.

At the heart of all your new music, there is this notion of really taking in the present moment with your senses. Are there any spiritual ideas or practices that you feel drawn to, which might have informed your music?

Well, my meditation practice is totally gone at this point – I don't do it anymore, but I do think that sitting in front of a modular synth and just having stuff going round and round and being really in that moment is a meditative practice. I know that sounds very trite and like an easy thing to say, but I genuinely believe it's true. Because you're in this continuous feedback loop, your brain is completely in sync with it. You can't be thinking about anything else, so you don't have the issue of bringing your thoughts back to the center, because you are the thing – you are doing this. You need to shut down whole parts of your brain and focus really heavily.

So, no, I don't have any spiritual practice that I can put a name on, but I'm certainly influenced by all those ideas, like [Zen master] Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas of being connected to the present moment, because obviously, everything wants to distract us from ourselves, and we need to feel our power, and we need to do what we can do as people, because just chasing after dopamine is a very disabling thing.

It sounds like you’re getting into a flow state when you’re making music, which is what many practices of Nondualism are about.

That's exactly the right word – a flow state. It's really great when it happens, but when you've got to record, you totally have to break that, come out of the situation and become the observer, the engineer. It totally fucks with it, you know, all of that beauty that you heard in that moment, the minute you break that spell, and you have to zoom out and become the professional who's trying to make music – it's such a different headspace. And then it all sounds wrong when you have to do another take, and you can never get back to that perfection.

Are there any artists or composers that you were heavily inspired by over the last couple of years?

Definitely. Annea Lockwood was really influential on me. I went to this university lecture by her, and she spoke about recorded sound, sampling and recontextualizing samples, using recorded sounds as small units, like a drum beat, or a hi-hat or whatever. She was also talking about field recording. “Let a sound complete its life”, she said, “Wait to see what happens. Record the whole 20 minutes. Just sit there and listen to it, and it's going to tell you a story, and it's going to have a whole world of its own.” We like to rush in and go, “Oh yeah, that door creak sounds like a drum. I'll chop it into a tiny bit and put it in my sampler.” She had the exact opposite approach, which is like, let the sounds have their life.

The other thing that she was talking about was how we all end up talking about music tech and plug-ins, because it is fascinating, and different parts of it can become gateways to your practice. But all of this never gets to the root of the matter, which is emotion. It often ends up in this quite rigid techno-masculinist thing, like “what's the loudest sound?” But isn’t it much more important what's the emotional information that you're trying to convey? So not to lose sight of that, and not to feel like that's some kind of hippie nonsense. That is the essence of creativity, and I've definitely kept that in mind. I want my tunes to communicate feelings.

In terms of opening the door to minimalism, I have to credit coming across Caterina Barbieri. I'd always misinterpreted minimalism. I thought it was about it not having any content, about it being sparse. But it’s actually this algorithmic, sequential, rhythmic thing, where you're using very small building blocks, like ostinati, and you're repeating them, trying to get the most out of them. I was like, “Oh, but that's what I'm doing.” So I totally dived in, investigating minimalism as a concept. That's why I mentioned the Orbital album, because it had that Steve Reichian phasing intro [“Time Becomes”]. Listening to that left a huge imprint on my mind when I was 12, but it took me till I was 42 to understand it’s all the same thing. Talk about being a late bloomer! It's really good for ego death though, because you realize you don't know anything, really.

Those would be the big ones, and then Laurie Spiegel as well. When I was listening to The Expanding Universe, I was just like, “I have to understand this. I have to get to know this.” Another huge influence, yeah.

In the press text to the new album you're mentioning that notions of domesticity and homemaking have informed the record as well. What does that mean?

Well, there's this basic idea of domesticity being traditionally linked to femininity and motherhood. Despite all of my feminist leanings, I've still ended up being a homemaker. Not that that's a bad thing, but I wanted to be honest about that and bring that into the music. I wanted that domesticity side to be given equal importance and weight with the more techno-masculinist side of music tech and sound design.

I’m not saying that femininity in general is linked to washing machines and Hoovers, but that is part of my life at the moment. I also wanted to explain that the tension in there is the danger to become defined by that thing. It's reductive and dangerous for women to say, “Yeah, I'm about washing machines and Hoovers”, because then you've basically just written yourself off. You've just written yourself out of the story; you're an idiot. So you've got to be careful. It's all about that tension and being brave enough to be honest.

Loula Yorke’s Time is a Succession of Such Shapes is out now.