Distant Sounds Of Summer

Volume 2 - Album 2

Without doubt one of Yokota's most beautiful and easily accessible productions. Haunting, majestic and timeless.

A1 Deep In Mist
A2: Water's Edge
A3: Path Fades Into Forest

B1: Lit By Moonlight
B2 Brook and Burn
B3: Sentiero

C1: Clear Space
C2: Reflections And Shadows

D1: Distant Sounds Of Summer
D2: Floating Moon

Including an essay by Nick Luscombe in the liner notes...

... “ Distant Sounds Of Summer, like so much of Susumu Yokota's output, is also musically so generous, where every sound and each space between is there for a reason. It is also music designed to be loved. And maybe some things in life are not about having to work out the whys are wherefores. Perhaps allowing space, to stand back and to be present and unquestioning in the face of something special and unique is better than knowledge and understanding.”...

Distant Sounds of Summer is an immediate return to the recognizable, a mellow study of two minimal elements. It is one of Yokota’s only wholly collaborative efforts, work made in tandem with Mark Beazley of Rothko and vocalist Caroline Ross. There is a profound synergy to their refined performances, acting as an accessible entry point to the Skintone catalogue. Yokota employs a slew of his hallmarks to gently evoke a new place in ambient experimentation; synthesising resonant bass guitar with flickering vocal mantras to clattering percussive loops. The album was composed remotely, beginning with Beazley’s bass riffs, stems, field recordings and piano one-shots - given to Yokota with free reign to their assembly. This is the point where Yokota’s composition shines, seamlessly melding their opposite poles into one exquisitely intimate space. Beazley received the album in its current form, with no re-edits and no further back and forth. The process was pure egalitarian union through Yokota’s deft touch; no lopsidedness, a summit of specialists.

The album’s ten tracks cast a gentle-spell, spacious electroacoustic evocations woven with emotional dexterity. The relaxed beat of the opener ‘Deep in Mist’ fuses with opaque pianos and bleary vocals for a gently evocative haze, a scene setting for the awaiting mutations. An ethereality brought back down to earth. The following ‘Water’s Edge’ is a langorous, impressionistic flicker, an opaque glimpse of Yokota’s classic techniques that leads into Beazley’s signature bass meanderings in ‘Path Fades Into Forest’. The warm guitar acoustics are overlaid with an unsteady drum track, eventually opening up into an elegiac flute passage. Here as through the album, the bass is elegant and gives way to faraway effects, an elevation of the first element. The ripple effect of ‘Lit by Moonlight’ is a nocturnal wail, a fusing of desolate guitar improvisations with resonant hushed room tones. It gently washes and loops with subtle temperament. ‘Brook and Burn’ is all textural, sleeper avant-pop with weightless grooves and two-chord bass cycles; Yokota adorning Beazley’s musings with Ross’ close-mic’d vocal mantras to evoke nebulous distance. ‘Sentiero’ chimes and reverberates atmospherically as the stunning centrepiece, an eye cast to a new terrain where Yokota’s tweaks delicately adorn Beazley’s absent-minded reveries.

Yokota’s landscape is constantly deconstructed and contorted in a fibrous ripple. ‘Clear Space’ opens to desolate harmonica configurations which ring over sombre drones, one of the abundant unexpected textures. It is replaced by a hip-hop beat and accompanying vocal polyphony from Ross, subdued and humanising. The delicate refinement of the close and human is clear in this tryst, everything is wrapped together. ‘Reflections and Shadows’ draws away again, prefacing the sinuous, seductive ambient poetics of Ben Bondy et al. with sprawling, suspended drones and ASMR plosives. It tessellates, as in the title track with guitar ramblings and bursts of graininess, to a new terrain occasionally disturbed. The closer, ‘Floating Moon’ flies the closest to Yokota’s Durutti Column-adjacent roots, with Beazley’s chorussed guitar phrases orbited by crackling vocal phrases and glassy synths. The prominent effect is expansive, pretty experimentation that subverts preconceptions about sounds. Two revered creators meet, gliding together and apart with ease. It remains an astonishing exploration of multi-instrumental ambient beauty. The at once deliberate and subtle movements oscillate from near to far, giving and taking away.