Crowd Control Vol.1 is a more thematic and focused offering from Suffolk based sound artist Loula Yorke, in comparison to her more techno-orientated output in ‘Ldols’.
The topic of surveillance capitalism covers the use of digital products such as social media, as a means of surveillance and corporate influence. The term was coined by the work of Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff and is also regularly covered by Silicon Valley commentator Jaron Larnier.
In Crowd Control Vol.1, Loula has employed the idea of using surveillance capitalism with privacy and protest, as a theme for a sound art installation. Utilising her innalog modular synth as main sound source. You can find out more about this instrument in her interview with us back in March.
In her words:
“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?”