IMAGE 1983-1998
“This is the
sort of music you put on while you're
doing the washing up only to find it has taken possession of your very soul.”
doing the washing up only to find it has taken possession of your very soul.”
Ben Thompson
Susumu Yokota is a new name to me – and Image is an unexpected gem; but for anyone who knows his work, I'm betting it will represent a double surprise. Previously known for his Techno forays, Yokota is revealed here as a studio alchemist of a very different stripe, warming nuggets of strange provenance, sifting unlikely ores, exhibiting deposits from unfamiliar maps.
It's like one man's musical subconscious, a scrapbook surprise: tentative miniatures, micro delights from 1 5 years of hearing things in the ether. ( 1 3 pieces in 34 minutes: some of the titles seem longer than the tracks they invoke) Brittle leaves, polished stones, unearthed molars, ghost laughter on an autumn afternoon: sonic images.
At times, it finds that same aching/erotic vein Burroughs hits when he table-taps childhood memories.
Field recordings from some half-imaginal land:
as if someone had extracted the Americana pump organ 'essence' of Tom Waits or The Band, and erased all the pomp, lyrical props, forward pulsion, drums and 'universalising' narratives... leaving a wraith work, an impure mood of broken mirrors, mono images, half recalled MOR choruses, circus refrains. On "Daremoshiranai Chisanakuni", with basically just a guitar and atmospherics, Yokota sends out more shivers than Waits can manage on a whole LP these days.
Ditto some of electronica's over-hyped grandmasters. If Techno is Yokota's public work, these are hallucinations from his private air.
Far from bearing the marks of current fashion, it made me think of an entirely other time – that other 7Os, not progressive, not punk, a strange 'here be miniatures' map, an imaginary country: "Morino Gakudan' is an object lesson in understatement (strings by 1919 Cale, synths by 1978 Cluster?) and is an Underground hit in waiting (I even heard it on the telly last night);
likewise, "Nisemono No Uta" is an unlikely - but somehow logical -twist of guitar, giggles and jazzy vibraphone glissandi.
If there's a comparison it's inevitably shortform Eno - when his music still had a sense of humour and absurdity - as well as some of the residents of his Obscure principality. With one caveat: it never sounds as if 'oddity' is the quality being pursued. Yokota fragments himself in brief snapshot gestures that scramble your listening vantage in one graceful dip, then move on.
“Amai Niyoi" hypnotises with simply strummed guitar and toy keyboard, where loops sound like strums and strums sound like loops "Tayutafu' has the delicacy of John Fahey's or Nick Drake's lonesome afternoon eddies.
Elsewhere, slideshow moments of freakish sonic collage evoke alternately tender, dirty, wistful, secret and scarifying moods. These are blurry sonic haiku - as if what Cage heard through the Zen grapevine had taken a circuitous route back East, with a keen joker's twist.
A joker's economy, too.
I find this take on things - where only a single tone or ghost voice seems to fill the air more than massed banks of whatever - captivating. It's sexy and funny - Little Feat to Pomp Ambient's Chicago. The hilarious/disturbing "Yumekui Kobito" is something like the 'I Am The Fly' in the ointment of Ambient's post-Namlook Epic Swathes obsession And maybe that is the true motor behind Yokota's release of this stuff. Maybe in Techno/Ambient land he's seen things tipping over into Concept/overdub madness, and this is his reaction.
Whatever. Image's micro mood engineering is pure phantasmal pop, a compelling tour of musical dustworlds. It makes you itch to hear whatever ivory dice Yokota rolls out next.
Ian Penman
November 1999
The best album of experimental Japanese instrumental meanderings ever? The first five tracks on this hugely addictive record - deceptively simple guitar and organ sketches in the manner of Jim O'Rourke at his most pastoral - were recorded in 1983-4. The other eight were done 15 years later. In between times Mr Yokota, best known until now for more straightforward electronic dance releases, claims that his "life became techno". Yet the fascinating thing about the more recent material here is the discreet, even subliminal way it seems to overlay Yokota's original contemplative template with techno's frosty blueprint. "I am my own special creation," insists a disembodied voice emerging from the hypnotic Nisemona No Uta, and the clarity of the moment is almost unbearably beautiful. This is the sort of music you put on while you're doing the washing up only to find it has taken possession of your very soul.
Ben Thompson
November 1999
Licensed from Skintone Records in Japan. Image 1983-1998 is a collection of works from Susumu Yokota from the early ‘80s (three from 1983 and two from 1984) and late '90s (eight pieces recorded between 1997 and 1998). The album's title reflects the theme of this package - the examination of the smallest details involved in sound, art, and emotion --most acutely in the accompanying artwork (photos, collages and paintings) by Yokota. The early tracks, recorded with just guitar and organ, omit a certain eerie mood through their simplicity (and, according to Yokota’s liner notes. inspired the newer tracks). Like the early musical works. the tracks from '97 and '98 again focus on subtle instrumentation, using acoustic guitar but adding a wide variety of keyboards and some chorused female vocals. Those who’re only familiar with the Yokota who trucks in the more electronic - techno, house. IDM and electro-jazz - might want to investigate this facet of this talented musician’s palette.
Andrew Duke
January 2000
No. 39
The concept of Kona (“powder”) and an ounce of metaphysics explain how these three discs can all be the work of one fascinating producer. Tokyo’s Susumu Yokota. Image 1983-1998, licensed by shrewd Leaf majordomo Tony Morley from Yokota’s own Skintone imprint, collects a handful early acoustic (organ/guitar) pieces and ore recent material inspired by these humble beginnings. Predating the techno phase represented by Yokota’s work on Harthouse/Eye-Q (Yokota), Sublime (Ringo, Prism, Susumu Yokota), and Space Teddy (Ebi), Image presents rough sketches for the jolly, carnivalesque melodies that have been a Yokota staple. Fingerpicked musings (“Tayutafu”) tremulous, Vini Reilly-like delay-scapes (“Wani Natte”), taped voices, and analog rales and wheezes flower into spiral-form fantasias and budding tone poems. Like Yokota’s paintings and sculpture of the same period. Yokota’s paintings and sculpture of the same period, the shades are predominantly soft and fluid, bleeding in parabolic curves and streaks, directed inwardly.
Jan 2000
Transient waves
In the summer of 1992, a Japanese economist turned-artist-turned-DJ/musician called Susumu Yokota slipped quietly into the consciousness of the global Techno community. The understatedness of Yokota's arrival seemed appropriate, for here was a musician whose trademark sound was built around a slippage between genres. Not so much in the groove as sliding all around it, Yokota's music was characterised by a delicacy of touch that was evident in even the hardest tracks which graced his first European release, Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection, issued in 1993 by Sven Vath's Harthouse label. Remix work - for Luke Slater and Max Brennan - followed, alongside a number of albums recorded for Japan's Sublime label, as well as two - Sakura and Magic Thread - released by his own Skintone Records. Most of them highlight Yokota's discreet take on Ambient driftworks, Acid House and post-Detroit Techno.
More recently, the London-based Leaf label has issued Image 1983-1998, a comprehensive compilation which casts Yokota in a different light, tracing his elliptical progress through 1 5 years of music making.
There is an unknown quality to certain tracks, such as the early 80s bedroom guitar experiments, or a piece like "Nisemono No Uta" ("Counterfeit Song"), which includes several bathroom choruses of Gloria Gaynor's high-street disco anthem, "I Am What I Am". The humour, while off-kilter, is disorientating. "It is like a slice of film," suggests Yokota via his translator, Mimi. "There's sadness, seriousness, inside the story and it depends very much on the scene the listener brings to it" Our conversation - if that's the right word for it - proceeds in a crab-like fashion. In advance of a scheduled London meeting, I e-mail questions to Tokyo, where they are collected and translated by Mimi. When we meet, Yokota, a genial six-footer, gestures me towards Mimi, who is clutching the sheaf of translated responses which they have worked on together. They are at pains to explain the 'meaning' of Image's title. 'It's difficult to translate," says Mimi, pointing to the Japanese characters on the CD sleeve as Yokota hovers in the background. "This one means 'mind'; this one 'reflections'; this one 'view'. It's got a deeper resonance in Japanese."
A few hours after our meeting, they phone through to pass on the results of a further impromptu conference on the question of the title's 'correct' translation. "We've decided it's Mental Image," says Mimi. "That's better." Beyond linguistics, the tracks on Image flick by like a series of Polaroids, isolating transient events in translucent, solarised interiors. Some of the music is suggestive of the kind of playful electro-dramas realised by Eno and Cluster 20 years ago; elsewhere, there are echoes of John Fahey's elegiac guitar phantasias. "It's difficult to answer," writes/says Yokota referring to the allusive/elusive quality of this music. "It is abstract, rather like the idea of a mental image. The sounds are products of my own memory, including those I did not experience directly, like a deja vu. It's like one scene from the movies of my memory, although I could not point out exactly which movie.”
"I had the idea to create various styles of music as a way of returning to my roots," he adds, the implication being that for a musician like Yokota, the notion of roots now equates to fleeting moments of identification with emergent sonic phenomena.
Searching for an appropriate analogy for a music that drifts at will across the trans-continental data streams, Yokota settles on kona, the Japanese word for powder. On the Image sleeve, which also includes hazy representations of a number of his mixed-media artworks, he writes: "I wished to be kona at the moment of death ... Sugar, stevia, some chemical drugs are a gathering of super-particles. Accumulate some white kona and blow on them. They will scatter and never be replaced exactly in their original form. Like the vagueness of memories."
"It is atmosphere that I'm interested in," he concludes. "It's like powder. Abstract. Free. One breath – pfff – and it's gone."
Louise Gray
December 1999
Private in public
Known mostly for his hyper-funky house and techno output on Japan's Sublime Records, Yokota steps out of the mold with image 1983-1998 by taking one giant, introspective step in. A collection of instrumental tracks Yokota laid down to space himself from his techno, image 1983-1998 is one of those deeply personal works that really sounds like it was never intended for mass consumption. It possesses a light-hearted intimacy and fearlessness that's hard to find in your local record shop. image includes music from two time periods: shore guitar and organ-based songs from the early '80s and more spacious·, electronic tracks from the late '90s. And all of this is in some way influenced by Yokota's visual art, which is nicely catalogued in the image liner notes. Of all the early music, only "Sakashima" sounds truly extraordinary with its crunchy, shifting, barely-audible organ tones. But Yokota's more recent work, particularly "Morino Gakudan," "Kawano Hotorino Kinoshitade," and “Amanogawa," is like glimpsing rare beauty amongst the ordinary. Yokota likens his creative process on image to "Kona," a Japanese word meaning "the assemblage of white grains." image is a very personal vision of beauty, pulsating with all the stuff of life. As Yokota writes in his liner notes, it's "the image- of time reaching the end of the millennium."
Chad Oliveiri
October 11 1999
Retrospective of Japanese musician's intriguing, experimental work.
One of the Leaf label's most evocative and beguiling releases, Images 1983- 1998 compiles the esoteric aural and visual images of Japanese jazz/house/techno chameleon Susumu Yokota. The collection's first five songs were recorded in 1983-84 with guitar and organ. these brief, atmospheric sketches are compelling in their simplicity. Unusually. Yokota has recently revisited these 15-year-old blueprints as stimuli for eight more new recordings.
In the intervening years between recording sessions, techno inevitably exerted a strong influence on the composer, yet Yokota emerges from his dalliance in dance uncertain as to the genre's worth. On his new tracks, Yokota effectively deploys motifs and clipped vocal samples but generally eschews techno’s sounds/dynamics. Instead, he prefers to seek inspiration from (in his words) "reality and everyday life-the food I eat. cats from my neighborhood, how I live·: The implication: Techno is somehow fake or unreal.
Yokota's reservations seem unfounded: Techno is no more (or less) artificial or contrived than any other music. But in trying to pursue his ideal of “real life" music, the composer
has inadvertently created an intriguing and experimental collection.
David Hemingway
November 1999
Mixing Desk
Likewise, the London based Leaf label has earned an equally uncategorisable reputation. The bewitching experiments showcased in Image 1983-1998 [Leaf] **** will further enhance the label's elusive catalogue, whilst confusing those who expect composer SUSUMU YOKOTA to reinforce his reputation as a peddlar of minimal techno.
In a series of sparsely structured yet beautifully constructed mood pieces, Yokota manages to reconfigure the theories of Phillip Glass ('Morino Gakudan'), Oval ('Sakashima') or Durutti Column ('Wani Nattie') without resorting to pastiche. Feeding acoustic elements through his dream machinery, this studio wizard develops an unusually melodic methodology, from within the traditionally restrictive structures of the electro-acoustic boffin community. An ardent advocate of the less-is-more philosophy, the Japanese dream forger has proved that
minimalism in all spheres has a transfixing meeting point. Captivating
Kevin Martin
October 1999
Takashi Yashima
2000
Ambient Confessions of a Japanese technohead
Susumu Yokota’s evocative sounds are mind-altering in the best tradition of Satie and Eno, finds Ben Thompson
Yokota: ‘I am my own special creation’
He idea of an ambient recording that stops you in your tracks may seem too be a contradiction in terms, but Susumu Yokota’s Image 1983-1998 (Leaf) does exactly that. The packaging for this exquisite half-hour selection (first released in the UK last year on license from Yokota’s own Skintone imprint, and now reissued on heavy vinyl) incorporates some rather bewildering samples of Yokota’s multimedia artwork and notes proclaiming his work’s affinity with “kona” – a Japanese word for an assemblage of white grains that, once scattered, “can never be replaced in their original form…Like the vagueness of memories.”
All of which is somewhat off-putting. Until you actually listen to the music.
Too often in the past the ambient tag has been an excuse for laziness; why bother putting any effort into what you do if people are going to be doing something else while listening? Any reprobate can leave a tumble-dryer on for half an hour, drop in some spoken word samples from day-time TV, and wrap the whole thing up in a nice picture of a cloud in the hope that some music journalist will call it a subliminal masterpiece.
But there is another, higher ambient tradition, the one too which Yokota’s record belongs. This tradition goes back too Brian Eno, and before him, too Erik Satie, and involves the painstaking creation of music designed to seep into your everyday existence and change the character of day-to-day life from within.
In Yokota’s case it is not just the sounds he makes that seem to crystallise intangible emotions; his working methods do, too. Image 1983-1998 is not a conventional compilation. The first five tracks – deceptively simple guitar and organ sketches, reminiscent of Jim O’Rourke – turn out to have been recorded in 1983-4. The other eight, picking up on earlier themes and opening them out like a daffodil in a speeded-up nature film, were done a decade and a half later. In between, Yokota previously best known in this country for more generic electronic dance releases such as Frankfurt/Tokyo Connection on Sven Vath’s Harthouse label – claims his “life became techno”.
To find out what he means by this it is necessary to enlist the help of an e-mail interpreter and embark on an interview process that might fairly becalled Japanese whispers. Judging by such earlier Yokotan verbal coups as his likening to acid house to “shrimps jumping up and down” the imprecise nature of this means of communication is an asset rather than a liability.
If Yokota “became techno” in the years after 1984, did he have to “un become” it to go to work again on the music he made before his techno awakening? “For a while I only had time for various forms of house. I was especially into the futuristic flow of Detroit music and the mentality of trance. But in the mid-to late Nineties it all became boring and at this time I realized that the new wave, which had initially inspired me around the end of the Seventies, (Young Marble Giants, Joy Division) was still fresh. I think these bands are my roots and Image was an opportunity for me to express that.”
Joy Division are often cited as a musical influence, but it seems especially gratifying that the magically quiet and evocative music of the obscure Welsh trio the Young Marble Giants should have travelled half-way around the world to warp the mind of a Japanese techno head. “The Young Marble Giants have affected me the most of all musically,” Yokota says; “I can feel deja-vu from them.” The tune on Image 1983-1998 that most strongly bears the Giants’ mark is the enthralling “Nisemono No Ula”, (roughly translated as “Counterfeit Song”.) This hypnotic song fragment also quotes Gloria Gaynor’s karaoke standard “I Am What I Am” to persuasive effect, as a disembodied voice emerges from the mix to proclaim, “I am my own special creation”.
Yokota has released music under a lot of different names, among them Stevia, 246, Prism and bizarrely, Ringo.
Are these separate identities a reflection of different parts of his personality, or just a practical means of getting round the problems caused by working with several record companies simultaneously? “Both of these are true. I wanted to make myself more chaotic, I thought I could find something new from mixing myself up…. but now I only release music under my real name.” Alongside the welcome re-issue of Image 1983-1998, Leaf are also putting out a new Yokota album. Magic Thread, which seems to join the dots between his Techno and Ambient personas (Sakura, the third album in this series that will follow on later this year). Could he tell British listeners what is the difference between these two records? “Image is me looking back at the past with a sense of nostalgia. Magic Thread is the sound of human evolution, weaving ever more intricate patterns from an initial thread of hemp.” Well, that’s that cleared up then.
Ben Thompson
Friday review
March 2000
SUSUMUY YOKOTA allows us to peer into his scrapbook with 13 variations on a
theme first recorded for his own Skintone label. Image re-examines the tonal territory of an· original guitar-and organ template from all conceivable angles. Sometimes Yokota seems to be sawing the track in half, at other times dousing it in interference. Best of all is Morino Gakudan, an impressionistic fragment of stunning beauty. In less imaginative hands such a project would have had you bored halfway through, but these sublime sketches sustain interest to the end.
September 1999
Rob Chapman
A package of musical snippets, visual images and philosophies from one of Japan's foremost
jazz/techno/house chameleons. The initial five songs are instrumental organ/guitar, the following
8 songs inspired by them but recorded over a decade later. Wonderfully imaginative and more
coherent once you read the sleeve notes.
Paul Sullivan
September 1999
Spooky, abstract and minimal musical
musings from Yokota. Try to imagine the
'Blair Witch Project' scored by Mishima on
an acoustic guitar.
September 1999
Album Briefs
Some spine tinglingly beautiful moments are included here, on this leaf (ho ho) through the early, largely acoustic experiments of Susumu Yokota, and it is clear evidence of why his house music stands so far above most of the dross of that genre. Although some tracks here come across as doodies in moments of abstract distraction. That can be forgiven in the light of the fragility and utter serenity of tracks like 'Tayutafu', 'Morino Gakudan', and the childlike wonder of 'Nisemono No Uta' and 'Kawano Hotorino Kinoshitade'
Steve Nickolls
September 1999