LOVE OR DIE
Love Or Die is the finest album from Yokota’s late period. Supposedly recorded while the producer was in a period of ill health, its 14 tracks feel wounded but spiritually uplifting, blending wistful, spiralling melodies and Windham Hill-style orchestration with some upbeat electronic rhythms—listen to the shuffling house of “That Person’s Hearsay Protects My Free Spirit” or the frisky drum & bass of “The Scream of A Sage Who Lost Freedom And Love Taken For Granted.” “This work can be seen as a spiritual return to his masterpiece, Sakura,” says DJ Yama. “As someone who knew him, I feel that the title of this album reflects his short but intense life itself. The ultimate theme—to love or die—seems to be deeply connected to the transience of existence and the inner conflict that he was constantly pursuing.”
Louis Pattison
31st July 2025
It seems like a long time since Susumu Yokota's marvellous 1999 album Sakura, and it seems even longer given his sheer weight of his releases since then. Yokota is nothing if not prolific. He's mercurial, too, moving from delicately melodic miniatures to Ambient exhalations to full-on dancefloor assaults as the mood takes him. Love Or Die, like most of Yokota's albums, first appeared on his own Skintone label in Japan. It's a typically wideranging collection, united as much as anything by lengthy and cryptically Zen song titles, which conceal a host of textural surprises. And not all of them are welcome: "The Sin Of Almighty God, Respected And Believed By The Masses" has a positively Gothic mood, with doomy phased guitars that might have been salvaged from an early 80s Cure B side, while the anodyne melody of "The Loneliness Of Anarchic Beauty Achieved By My Ego" is stickily reminiscent of a local radio jingle. But as always with Yokota, there are also moments of sublime felicity and captivating rhythmic science. It's just difficult not to suspect sometimes that making music comes just a little too easily to him.
January 2008
Albums such as Sakura and Grinning Cat established Japanese composer Susumu Yokota as a leading exponent of blissed-out ambience. His preference has always been for languid, liquid beats and a well-chosen smattering of chimes and bells.
Love Or Dieis stitched together from those same textures and fabrics that served him well in the past. But, unlike his previous triumphs, there's little for the listener to engage with beyond some interesting shapes and glossy sounds.
While other producers working in the same ballpark use drama and emotion to bolster their melodies, Yokota's sounds are stiff and aloof. Yet when there are occasional flurries to areas beyond his comfort zone ( For the Other Self Who Is Far Away That I Can Not Reach), Yokota shows he's more than capable of using a track's dynamic to dictate his mood swings.
Jim Carroll
28th April 2008
Original Review in German:
Die perlenden Klavierakkorde des Eröffnungstracks „For The Other Self Who Is Far Away That I Can Not Reach“ (ja, alle Lieder der CD tragen solche langen, leicht prätentiösen Titel), unter die sich dann mit erhabener Leichtigkeit ein gebrochener elektronischer Rhythmus schiebt, setzen gleich die Stimmung für den Rest des Albums. Auf Love Or Die kehrt Susumu Yokota zu seinen Wurzeln zurück, will heißen: zu entspanntem Ambient-Techno und kontemplativer Electronica mit Bezügen zu klassischen Elementen. Nichts an diesem Album will aufregen, alles zieht an einem vorüber wie ein angenehmer warmer Sommererregen. Schwerelose Streicher, warm schwebende Synthesizerflächen, verwehte Rhodes-Akkorde und leicht von Drum’n’Bass angehauchte Polyrhythmik. Das kommt oft gefährlich nah an die Grenze zum Kitsch, ohne sie jedoch jemals zu überschreiten, und erinnert stark an Früh-Neunziger-Electronica. In jedem Fall eine höchst angenehme akustische Wolke, in die man sich auch tiefer versenken kann.
English Translation (via Google Translate):
The shimmering piano chords of the opening track, "For The Other Self Who Is Far Away That I Can Not Reach" (yes, all the songs on the CD bear such long, slightly pretentious titles)—joined with sublime ease by a broken electronic rhythm—immediately set the mood for the rest of the album. On *Love Or Die*, Susumu Yokota returns to his roots: relaxed ambient techno and contemplative electronica infused with classical elements. Nothing about this album seeks to agitate; everything drifts by like a pleasant, warm summer rain. Weightless strings, warm, floating synthesizer pads, drifting Rhodes chords, and polyrhythms with a touch of drum 'n' bass. It often comes dangerously close to kitsch without ever crossing the line, strongly evoking early-nineties electronica. In any case, it is a highly pleasant sonic cloud—one you can easily lose yourself in.
Tim Lorenz
19th March 2008
Love Or Die might be categorised as one of Susuma Yakota's ambient albums, but that's perhaps too strict a categorisation for a record so balanced as this. For all the wealth of textured, synthetic atmosphere, you'll still find a backbone of electronic rhythms running through these recordings, starting with the digital waltz 'For The Other Self Who Is Far Away That I Cannot Reach'. At first you might be struck by how artificial all this sounds: the synth piano and strings, bathed in reverb, take some getting used to but as you work your way through the record this sort of language becomes all the more endearing - heck, using these sorts of MIDI-style instruments is something that could practically be termed as vintage nowadays, so it's certainly not without its charms. In compositional terms, tracks like 'That Person's Hearsay Protects My Free Spirit' have a kind of spongy lightness to them and an airy melodic presence, while something like 'A Song Produced While Floating Alone On Christmas Day' has an Orb-like warm 4/4 ambience. Elsewhere you'll hear the sort of programmed beats - and even Aphex-style breakbeats - that recall a classic early nineties electronic language, After the initial shock of just how 'keyboardy' the album is, Love Or Die's beauty and elegance soon becomes apparent, and you'll be happy to file this next to the likes of Grinning Cat and Sakura.
2008
Since Susumu Yokota's celebrated Sakura album, which earned him a reputation as a master of ambient electronics and an international audience of deep listeners, the Japanese producer has remained restlessly active and exploratory, releasing upwards of a dozen albums in less than a decade, no two of them quite alike. Without relying on an obvious gimmick, like 2005's Western art music pastiche Symbol, or an overtly conceptual approach, like its immediate predecessor, Wonder Waltz, Love or Die simply offers another reshuffling of Yokota's familiar assortment of musical fascinations, and the result may be the clearest encapsulation yet of his unique, multifarious vision. Love continues Waltz's conceit of using exclusively triple-meter time signatures, but while that album was a fussy, stylistically sprawled collection that sounded like it was trying desperately to explore as many rhythmic iterations and textural juxtapositions as possible, these tracks are far more fluid and cohesive, and somehow less rhythmically overbearing even though they have possibly the most prominent beats of any of his ostensibly "ambient" albums. Eschewing vocals (and collaborators of any sort, for the first time in a while), and generally limiting percussive content to a single looped phrase per track (be it a jungle-esque breakbeat, a stately, minimal jazz groove, or a straightforward three-legged disco glide), he hones in instead on lush, consonant sonorities and lyrical melodic structures not unlike the classical music he vivisected to create Symbol. While attending closely to musical and textural nuance, Yokota allows his compositions ample room to breathe, making for a record that feels more relaxed, and is easier to relax to, than anything he's done in years, even if it has little in common with the minimalism of his earlier ambient work. For that matter, it has little to do with most of what is typically thought of as "electronica," even though it features as many synthetic instruments as "real" ones (pianos, most notably) -- you might find parallels in the more melodious end of Aphex Twin's output, or Boards of Canada's pastoral reveries, but it's closer in effect to a sort of futuristic chamber music, one unabashedly fixated on sweetness, purity, and beauty. The ponderous track names may be rather ridiculously bombastic (if appropriately flowery and evocative), but the music itself is appealingly unassuming and gentle, making Love or Die less of an emphatic declaration than a strong understatement.
K. Ross Hoffman
Electronic composer Susumu Yokota has always been something of an enigma. During the late nineties and the first few years of this century he had a dual career as a producer of down-to-earth, functional, dancefloor oriented techno, and also of neo-classical, experimental, ambient works. Curiously it was the more left field material that garnered the most attention, and albums such as Sakura and Grinning Cat were heaped with praise from such unlikely quarters as Mojo magazine, not the first place you’d think to look to find out about modern composition. Many followers were perplexed by Symbol, his 2005 album which was constructed around many well-loved classical pieces by composers such as Claude Debussy and Camille Saint-Saëns. It may have been a richly romantic work, but it was a long way from the cod-classical, muzak interpretations of William Orbit’s dismal Pieces In A Modern Style.
The follow-up Wonder Waltz, though, really didn’t work. The introduction of vocals by Caroline Ross, Iva Bittova and Kahimi Karie, although inoffensive in themselves, only sugared further an already sweet mixture to leave a concoction that felt bland. The set’s other innovation of utilizing waltz time for all the pieces was largely overlooked. Thankfully, the vocals have been discarded on Love Or Die, but the waltz-time experiment has been repeated.
My first reaction to the album was, frankly, pretty hostile. There are lots of pretty piano arpeggios, muted beats, and a warm, romantic sound that seems at first more in keeping with 70s pseudo-classical acts like Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre and Tomita than with cutting-edge, modern electronica. The more I’ve listened, though, the more sense it’s made. Sure, there is no lack of melody and very little sign of any atonal or dissonant elements, but there is much more to Love Or Die than just a bunch of pretty tunes. A lot of the beats seem to be aimed at the dancefloor, until you pause to wonder how any DJ would program a piece in 3 / 4 time into their set. Most tracks are piano led, but not all: “The Scream Of A Sage Who Lost Freedom And Love Taken For Granted Before” (all the tunes have these fortune cookie type titles) is led by shimmering guitar chords that evoke early Durutti Column and ends in a triple time drum & bass coda – far out. “A Song Produced While Floating Alone On Christmas Day” is led by those fuzzy analogue synths so beloved by Boards Of Canada.
The whole album has a warm, wistful quality, but is packed full of ideas and little quirks. After living with it for a few days, I can’t begin to imagine how I wasn’t bowled over from the outset.
Dez Wright
28th March 2008
‘yet another work of deep, phantasmagoric magic… Yokota proceeds to provoke and astound in equal measure… from sublime ambient textures to polyrhythmic, polyethnic hybrids. Refined, delicate and endlessly intriguing, this is one of Yokota’s most engaging projects for a long while.’
‘The quality of Yokota’s productions has never been more apparent than on this album. Like a book that is difficult to put down, it’s easy to get caught up in the world created by Susumu Yokota.. one of his best albums.’