Dreamer

Volume 2 - Album 7

An album that covers all Yokota's favourite bases from deep immersive ambience to rollingbreaks, deep house and sampladelic experimentalism.

A1: Human Memory
A2: Flitting Ray
A3: Subconscious Globe

B1: Inception
B2: Double Spot Image
B3: Quiet Room

C1: Animation of the Airy
C2: Renounce the World

D1: Brainwashing and Senses
D2: A Day at the Planet
D3: Legendary Stream

Including an essay by Rob Young in the liner notes...

... “Dreamers, more often than not, are romantic outsiders defined by their refusal to engage with the material, practical, threatening world. You could argue that was also true of Susumu Yokota in the final years of his life, when he largely removed himself from public appearances and the club/festival scene. The stripping out of beats from his music coincided with a growing interest in music's ethereal, atmospheric, sampladelic experimentalism. 'Dreamer', released three years before his death, keeps its feet in both camps. 'Human Memory' starts the album on the (alternative) dancefloor, but the whole thing – if indeed it was made as a piece, and we'll never know for sure – drifts towards an enchanted place of disembodied meditation. 'Dreamer' is a sanctuary.”...

Dreamer is the final album, possessing beautiful singularity. There is a strong sense in Yokota’s evolution that Kaleidoscope a couple of years previous was a culmination of explorations, that he had grasped what he had set out to hold. He was designing his own universe, with a slippery command of sound that pursued beauty by reimagining Western cultural genres through a prism of his own relentless imagination. The anthology of sound created; diverse and fleeting, is testament to a master’s intellect, virtuosity and style. In so many works of transformation, each step becomes integral to the understanding of the next. For some time he had been totally adept at this practice of shedding and regrowing, a constant transmutation.

With Dreamer, Yokota gently brushes against the dancefloor elements of his earlier fame. He evokes a true decadence, rhapsodies of techno pulses and wafting breaks reminiscent of this youthful plurality. Familiar scenery, distorting wonderfully. It is his classic awareness, a meditation that synthesises and compliments itself. He has always been revered as an escapist, a craftsman who evades boundaries to access his own nuanced utopia. Whilst retaining all the baroque, lush and occasionally monastic splendour he still packs punches of stompers, movement reminders. The reverberations are murmurs and prayers, calls for fictive consciousnesses. He jumps around, pulling psychedelic aural apparitions and droning pulses together dynamically. This record is in essence mimetic, a cryptic recollection of memories and feelings.

There is an abundance to the Skintone series; its celestial textures, pulsing polyrhythms and hybrid cries always incarnate a place previously unimagined. The pleasure of listening is in this dynamism; each composite part becoming not just a melodic fragment but a function in a larger organism. A sensory composition that incarnates, casting a spell of animated beauty. The sonic signals of Dreamer are surreal, occasionally impolite, and totally absorbing. It is a clear reminder beyond the globetrotting source materials to his ability to distort and elevate. Nothing Yokota has touched resembles what it was before, samples are extracted and reflected through a totally new gaze. It is generous - esoteric, but without pretension. His concluding work feels like a live take, a performance. A final meditation on his form; through the ornate and the austere. It is a gift.