Love Or Die

Volume 2 - Album 4

An overlooked classic in the Yokota canon with elements of shoegaze, blissed out lo fi electronica and smudged new age fantasy.

A1: For The Other Self Who Is Far Away That I Can Not Reach
A2: A Slowly Fainting Memory Of Love And Respect, And Hatred
A3: The Loneliness Of Anarchic Beauty Achieved By My Ego

B1: A Heart-Warming And Beautiful Flower Will Eventually Wither Away And Become Dirt
B2: The Sin Of Almighty God, Respected And Believed By The Masses
B3: That Person’s Hearsay Protects My Free Spirit

C1: The Things That I Need To Do For Just One's Love
C2: The Scream Of A Sage Who Lost Freedom And Love Taken For Granted Before
C3: A Song Produced While Floating Alone On Christmas Day

D1: The Now Forgotten Gods Of Rocky Mountain Residing In The Back Of The North Woods.
D2: The Sacred Ceremony Concieved By Chance From An Evil Lie
D3: The Destiny For The Little Bird Trapped Inside A Small Cage For Life

Including an essay by David Stubbs in the liner notes...

... “There is at least a moment on each of these tracks, some point of light, or unexpected, striking sonic intervention when the listener simply has to smile, their expectations subverted. Certainly, there’s a deceptive, unassuming wit in the delibrately verbose, exaggeratedly precise titles to these tracks, often with a sting in their tail, or acting like cryptic clues to be deciphered instrumentally.”...

Love or Die is an interplay of familiar sounds and instrumentation as an exercise in paradox. Yokota develops here a stark duality; an introspection behind the veil of sedation. Overtly digital synth presets tracing organic arcs, blissful solace undercut with distant menace, and gilded baroque follies looping in blinkered, deeply focused cycles. His fraught and impassioned artistic practice is at the centre of his work, a constantly examined self. Beyond the engineered artifice of the sonic palette, with many of Yokota’s synth patches sounding like syrupy presets on the FM synthesisers of the 90s, there is a great deal of beauty to be found in their serpentine, bell-like melodic rhythms. It is a phantasmagoric hybrid; an expression of Yokota’s extraordinary ability to sonically express the fleeting and contradictory nature of everyday life. Even the titles are twisting and verbose, webs to be untangled.

Conceived as a spiritual successor to Wonder Waltz, only a year previous and drawing on its waltz-time collages, Love or Die is an essential entry to the Yokota cannon, a locus of his fragile and relentless ceremony. Composed in a period of ill health, there is an air of self-preservation and healing throughout, as if Yokota was piecing together aural analogues of his time spent resting and soaking in pockets of nature in his local Tachikawa City. Bordering on new-age mysticism, it possesses all the clandestine health-giving properties of the best Klaus Schulze or Isao Tomita arrangements, but retaining an aloofness above sentimentality. Bound in repetitive dependencies, it invites envelopment.

Razor-sharp break tekkers are flaunted on tracks like ‘The Scream of a Sage Who Lost Love Taken For Granted Before’, which opens out into a passage of disarmingly rude amen choppage in its final throes. The foreboding tone on tracks like ‘The Sin of Almighty God, Respected and Believed by The Masses’ also upsets the overwhelming consonance and celestial harmonics of the album, bringing a touch of aching realism to Yokota’s gently reeling polyphony, while the sparse, wide-eyed impressionism of studies like ‘A Heart-warming and Beautiful Flower Will Eventually Wither Away and Become Dirt’ further fracture the veneer of total utopianism, with insistent, faintly menacing synth throbs gradually growing in volume to eclipse gentle piano undulations. A multifarious vision combining elements of post-punk jangle, bleary-eyed synth utopianism, and sedating polyrhythmic hybrids.

A gentle, meandering offering; one of Yokota’s most soothing to date, and still circling a core of paradox and contradiction. Made up of a series of contrapuntal, consonant MIDI sketches, which pulsate in seemingly endless cycles like mediaeval plainchant, woven with tactile drum programming and poignant guitar lines in a swirling and undulating tapestry. Instrumentally, it calls to mind the pianistic flights of fancy on Grinning Cat, or the pure tone pointillism of some of the latter cuts on Image. Beyond these reminders, this work transcends the linear functionality of earlier albums, tracing new impossible symmetries with ornate phrases looping on into infinity. It arcs with deep refinement, pure and confusing. With a tender brutality, Yokota places everything in closer proximity, intervening in the smudged fantasies of the psyche.