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Crowd Control Vol 1 is a live sound performance examining themes of privacy and protest in the age of surveillance capitalism. The 22-minute performance comprises audio and video recorded live for TUSK Festival 2020. The work is accompanied by a selection of 'Studies' – interlinking live rehearsal outtakes listed below the main work.
"Sometimes you read about the ideas behind a release and find that the concept is better than the execution. That's not the case here. With Crowd Control, Loula Yorke attempts to draw together ideas about privacy and protest, surveillance and data mining, all while making exciting music that's more than just a lofty idea. The sound is a mixture of white noise, vocal recordings and sonic manipulations that's hard to pin down but easy to enjoy." Aidan Hanratty, Bandcloud #316
"Loula Yorke’s beguiling set of beat-driven electronics and concrète collage, a texturally rich blend of sounds with a definite early Warp clonk at its heart, presented split screen with her voltage-controlled laser providing some intrigue." Lee Fisher, NARC Magazine
This iteration of Crowd Control Vol 1 was recorded for TUSK Virtual festival on 13 September 2020. The performance was broadcast on 10 October 2020 at TUSK Virtual, with highlights including an excerpt of this piece broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction.
Further detail:
"Our digital communications and social posts feel private but are in fact mined for information and predictive behavioural data by third parties from supermarkets to state agencies. Similarly, crowds feel like a safe environment in which to find solidarity and take action but are in fact intensely surveilled, with individual people identified and criminalised later on the basis of social media posts and video footage.
“A voltage-controlled laser is trained on a vase of flowers, lit candles and mementos sitting on a silver tray. The movement of the laser is controlled by the sound waves created during the performance.
“A film plays, heavily featuring the colour yellow, in homage to Sarah Hegazi. Wildflowers are inspected under a microscope; crowds of people process slowly through city streets.
“A live sound piece is performed using my Innalog modular synthesiser and a drum machine. I open the piece by layering white noise over recordings of crowds gathered at social justice protests: the resulting mix of sonic data – ‘signal’ and ‘noise’ – is then sculpted over time using different types of filtration and FX, including granular and spectral processing. Melodic elements start to appear; oscillators bleep, rising and falling; drums; the sound of a female voice is looped to create rhythm. Gradually the mix is peeled back to the foundational building blocks of the piece: white noise and crowd noise, people and data, information littered across the digital panopticon; but who is controlling the laser?”
Loula Yorke
credits
released October 10, 2020
All tracks written and recorded by Loula Yorke
Additional engineering and digital production by Dave Stitch
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