MAGIC THREAD
“Upbeat rigid, introspective and eloquent by turns, it conjures up a cloud-like playfulness courtesy of a distinctive Japanese like rhythm which pushes and pulls the senses in opposite directions.”
Jonas Stone
Jonas Stone
“Somewhere in the process of evolution the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind,”
writes Susumu Yokota on this first European release of his 1998 CD Magic Thread. “How did this come to pass?”
And the answer is...not much help really in getting a handle on the extraordinary yet evasive weft of his Fluxus electronica.
Since he evacuated Acid Jazz, Ambient and all other safehouses along the Tokyo-London-Detroit-Chicago axis, his music has gone into freefall and ended up in a womb nine months before the disco.
He is now producing nascent forms whose future shapes contained in single-toned cells floating dreamily in amniotic fluid, even as they unknowingly gravitate towards each other in rhythmic strings of life.
The most compelling pieces here pick up on and amplify those strings’ muffled pulses “Reflux” is a simple yet tremendous heaving rhythm rising from a swoon of electronic near silence. Four tracks later, on “Potential”, that same lifeforce has evolved into a more complex creature trailing limbs that inquisitively reach out and punch keys or pluck at guitars. On “Stitch”, the music buzzes with the static and interference, an ecstasy of communication. Still nine months before the disco, disillusion has not yet kicked in.
Biba KopfMarch 2000
Tokyo's Susumu Yokota delivers yet more wistful, harmonic landscaping which although it predates last year's 'Sakura’, feels a good deal more contemporary.
Upbeat rigid, introspective and eloquent by turns, it conjures up a cloud-like playfulness courtesy of a distinctive Japanese like rhythm which pushes and pulls the senses in opposite directions.
Nothing is wasted nor without purpose as the versatile Yokota fashions a drifting electronic effort which, to borrow from Paul Daniels, really is magic.
****
Jonas Stone
March 2000
March 2000
“Somewhere in the process of evolution the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.”
Susumu Yokota expresses with his use of electronics and circuitry, particularly in this analogy of wires as conventional threads, a paradoxical form of ancient modernism. Blips weave through the atmosphere, rhythms pulse and by, and forgotten percussive notes sound like woodblocks, creating illusions of organic machinery. Then at other times, such as the track metabolic’, the breath is forced out as the motor kicks back into life, forming a dense mesh of stifling factory noise: the eternal struggle of nature (the old) versus technology (the new).
Are more mechanised musics replacing the human touch or has Yokota succeeded in marrying the two? We can no longer be complacent about the music of sound.
The cycle time regulating the ups and downs of music is getting shorter and some of the peaks and valleys are getting higher and lower. You have to be on your toes a lot more than in the past, you have to be able not to panic or overact. Sureness and steadiness worked for my dad’s generation.
But now it's reaction time.
Matthew Ivany
2000
“The album is a dark, moody collage of industrial urban atmospheres. Strange, lilted rhythms are carefully woven together from mechanical sounds, metallic clicks and scrapes and the occasional breakbeat sample. Other tracks use the static crackle and buzz of electricity, making the record sound as if it is plugged directly into the national grid. Here we have Yokota as alchemist – using this dark and mysterious collection of sound as his base material, he creates something that is strange, intense, and very beautiful.”
Jonathan Hughes
2000
“You could call it 'electronica', but it's more warp and weft than Warp
Records. For his second Leaf album (following last year's "Image”), Japan's
Susumu Yokota takes the familiar hack metaphor of samples being woven
together and makes an instrumental concept album out of it, inspired by the
arts of spinning and weaving. This engrossing faintly creepy music suggests Yokota is more interested in metaphysics than industrial history, however. It's elusive stuff that - like materials created from ‘Magic Thread' he's so entranced by - is mysteriously much greater than the sum of its parts. The 11 tracks are heady with portent-laden atmospherics
that aren't easily broken up into their constituents, so that describing them is
like trying to catch handfuls of air. In other words- as you consider calling ‘Circular' a soundtrack for underwater autobahns. or identify the key element
of 'Spool' as a collection of malignant clocks - it just makes you look stupid. A more prosaic angle on ‘Magic Thread' places Yokota between the processed glitches typical of A-Musik and Mego releases and the pulsating techno of Richie Hawtin. But, again,
there's that curious ambience, all creak and hiss~ a hint of something arcane. The feeling that Yokota, enchanted by witchy dreams and properly ethereal sounds, exists on a different spiritual plane to most of his contemporaries. Which makes 'Magic Thread'. with a certain woolly inevitability, much more
than any old rope.”
John Mulvey
March 2000
John Mulvey
March 2000
Japanese producer Susumu Yokota has had a long and multifaceted career, spanning almost two decades and a variety of musical styles. Yet for those (like me), who were only familiar with Susumu Yokota's work as a house producer on releases such as 1999, this disk is quite a revelation. Much of the music on Magic Thread falls under the heading ‘ambient,’ although it's a peculiar unsettling, freaky type of ambient music― it's beautiful, but not exactly relaxing.
Some tracks, especially the more spare ones, such as the gorgeous opener ‘Weave’ and ‘Spool,’ seem indebted to traditional Japanese music (or maybe it just sounds that way to these Western ears). At other points, such as on ‘Circular’ or ‘Potential,’ when Yokota uses subtle housebeats to propel his oh-so restrained music forward, the music would be quite at home on a label such as Swim. An enthralling and beautiful record.
S. Bolle
2(18)
3 May 2000
Wistful yet alien electronica from Japan.
"Somewhere in the process of evolution," states Susumu Yokota on the sleeve of his latest archival release, "the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical qualities." Yokota's words don't reveal much about the content of his songs, but the composer presumably perceives each filament of twine as a metaphor for the sound sources (stuck compact discs? maltreated electronic equipment?) that he knits together so adroitly. Track titles extend the theme: “Weave,” “Unravel,” “Spool,” etc. the composer is a refugee from Japan's acid-jazz, house and techno scenes and while (in print) he seems to have rejected the dancefloor's functional imperative, he still hasn't totally jettisoned the experimental-techno impulse and still aptly deploys repetitive beats and motifs: "Metabolic!' is the most (literally) bangin' track, industrial in the sense that's its clattering metallic core sounds like a paean to the manufacturing industry; "Stitch" buzzes with the kind of errant static and interference more normally associated with the Mego label et al. But, for the most part, Yokota disrupts
the senses with wistful alien electronica that is, by turns, strident and introverted.
David Hemingway
August 2000
Tokyo Prolific producer of Jazzy House and Textured Ambience, Susumu Yokota stands somewhere between a grapevine and a sexy planet. Justi Echeles travels through the language barrier to talk to the cool cat behind the chilled tones.
Japan’s Susumu Yokota is a renaissance man on a global scale. DJ, photographer, metalworker, artist, lyricist and prodigious producer, Yokota’s artistry is one of wise sensibility. Even if you don’t recognize his name, changes are you could listen through his dense discography and have a few epiphanal moments of ‘oh yeah, I know that one…’ Since his 1992 Frankfurt – Tokyo Connection release on Harthouse, Yokota’s ambient, house, techno and jazzy variants thereof have been putting some of the bliss into blissed-out dancefloors everywhere. His new album, Zero, is a chilled masterwork that shines a light to where, according to Yokota’s lyrics, “Everything reflects in your eyes/Starts to sound in your ears.”
The Japan office of Sublime, the label that releases much of Yokota’s work, is located in the youthful and bustling Shibuya district in Tokyo.
From this clean, modern space the deceptively plain and boyish-looking Yokota directs attention to the streets outside as one of his main sources of inspiration. From his music and visual imagery, Yokota looks to be inspired by nature and space, but its “everything,” he says, “not just art, but the people in Shibuya, Shinjuku, Tokyo…”
To Yokota, the words ‘one world,’ sum up each album he produces, intimating his desire to create a whole world through his music. A few moments looking at some of Yokota’s art featured on his CD covers reveals such calmed imagery as a simple grapevine or wine rack made of steel, both photographed in a slightly out-of-alignment blur that trademarks his visual work. Like Yokota’s music, it is the essence of the thing that affects you directly. With the connections between his art and music, it’s a wonder that he doesn't combine the dance and art environments. Yokota offers that while it’s easy to make the music and to DJ, the organising of art/music events is a different matter, though the possibility remains. If ever there was a producer whose music mirrors the moniker of the label for which he records, it’s Yokota.
Elevated and astonishing, his relationship with Sublime makes sense and he appreciates the label’s open approach to his creative process. Yet Yokota maintains his own label, Skintone, to enable the release of more personal projects. Skintone allows him to do everything he wants to do with little care about sales and business considerations. Ambient, experimental, techno, traditional Japanese, house, classical, jazz-categories don’t matter; simply making the music that he wants is what counts.
It's Friday night and Yokota has an early slot at Tokyo Drome, a mostly trance event held at one of Tokyo’s more uncouth venues, Liquid Room, where the door staff are not the friendliest, the sound isn’t great and the evening is geared towards the trance masses. With a slow, atmospheric start, Yokota draws in the trickling with a snake-like flow of ambient house and harder beats.
He succeeds in getting the floor moving even though his winding river of a set is better suited to a more intimate venues where the current of sounds would be more emotionally navigable.
As an introduction of sorts to Magic Thread (released on Leaf/Skintone), Yokota touches on the ethereal quality of all of his work. “Somewhere in the process of evolution the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.”
The thread of Yokota’s music is that of a collective humanity that is now emerging from a bleaker world into a more intelligent and tender sensibility. Fuck Prozac take six Susumu Yokota CDs and see you in a week. Like the post-e feeling of vulnerability and hopefulness, Yokota’s music has the effect of an enchanted medicine: complicated and serene, informed and simple, layered yet clean. What he does is not necessarily the Japanese way, or the dancefloor way, but simply, “the Yokota way”.
Many thanks to Emi Mari at Sublime for translating,
Justi Echeles
No. 43
13 July 2000
Susumu Yokota's alternative stars continue on the ascendance, after last year's release of the sublime 'Images', with the first release outside of Japan for 'Magic Thread', originally the first LP on Yokota's own Skintone label. 'Magic Thread' reinforces Yokota as a giant of talent, regardless of which style he chooses to pursue, and although this is more electronic than the acoustic sounds of 'Images', it harnesses the same ability in spatial atmospherics and delicate styling, that somehow capture moods, fleeting ideas, random thoughts, moments of insight, and translates them into an audio spell.
Steve Nickolls
April 2000
The Japanese maestro just can't help coming up with delicate sounds of rare invention. Not content with last year’s soundtrack for underground airports, he returns with songs about, em, the thread of life. Or something. You’ll be confused as to why, but will find yourself drawn time and time again.
March 2000
It has become difficult to ignore the accomplishments and sound ventures concocted by Leaf label producer Susumu Yokota. His latest gift Magic Thread lends deeply into the surreal and the gentile abstract. With his reach grasping much further than his native Pacific Rim habitat. Susumu Yokota transcends musical boundaries, bypassing normal production routes by zigzagging among ambient excursions while simultaneously flirting mildly with break beats and pulse-rhythms. A much-anticipated offering to say the least Magic Thread shows just how innovative one man can be and just how many different paths one person can take.
Brad Anderson
2(22)
June 2000
Takashi ShinjoAugust 2000
With dazzling electronic mutations and energetic beatsystems, Susumu Yokota reflects upon that underappreciated fiber of ongoing historical importance ... thread.
Indeed, in Yokota's able hands soundwaves are spun into 11 ear-pleasing tapestries as surely as if they were woven from magic thread.
Entrancing weave pulls us into a beatless murk of watery surroundsound where a host of unknown sources ripple enticingly.
Echoey guitar sounds repeat throughout hazy reflux, backed by lightly tapping beats and cymbals. Quiet grit cycles through unravel as fluid distortions seep out into a spreading pool of percussion-free resonance.
Beginning with a thrumming groove and persistent drumbeats, layer upon layer is added to the hypnotic circular; almost microscopic textures bleep out at a leisurely danceable pace as gauzey, brass-like swells radiate. spool (6:47) seems to unroll hesitantly, sweltering in a moody hush as faintly clattering soundcycles appear on several levels and synthtones hover and echo.
potential reaches a juxtaposition of airy electronics topped by driving (though somehow non-aggressive) percussion.
Sporadic outbursts of slightly grungy tones wash over the muted e-ripples of fiber (2:08). Buzzing binaurally with scritchy warbles, metabolic picks up a throbbing beat, and then again another slightly offset pounding rhythm. Layers of bubbly static coat stitch's resonant humming frequencies.
A tribal-ish vibe which emanates from the drummy foreground of dispassionate-yet-warm blend overpowers the washy backdrop of fragile belltones.
Digital microtextures underscore the wavering energies which twist obliquely through melt, cutting off this collection on a softly experimental strand ...
The silky fabrics of Susumu Yokota's creations shimmer in subtle sweeps and colors, never overt, except in the thoughtfully applied rhythm sections. Magic Thread pulls together a most impressive convergence of experimental electro-ambient and (often) restrained beatronics. Tie yourself up with these very cool 9.0 sounds which can be found at Dutch-East India.
David J Opdyke
29 May 2000
DREAM WEAVER
Music from memory is often a difficult concept to control. Steve Nicholls ventured into the intricate musical world of Susumu Yakota and left with a feeling of enlightenment.
Have you ever had a dream so vivid, so lifelike, that you were sure it was real, until you woke up? Unsettling isn't it? Vaguely unnerving, but at the same time intriguing, like you might have just had a glimpse of another dimension, one that we still don't properly know how to access. Susumu Yokota has been there, on several occasions, and he has made some records about what it was like.
"I make an album as if it were a movie," he explains, "after the introduction, the story unfolds scene by scene. Each song is a different scene. In the case of both 'Images' and 'Magic Thread' I recalled memories, then imagined the sounds of those memories. As the memories are quite abstract and obscure now, it felt more imaginative to complete the music without necessarily concluding it, i.e. manufacturing a finished product."
Yokota refers to the brace of albums that were released in the last month or so; 'Images 1983-1998', and 'Magic Thread', the very first releases from his own Skintone label.
Previously only available in Japan, the UK's Leaf Label made a wise move in snapping them both up for a European release; something for which we should be extremely grateful.
Better known for his techno and house excursions, particularly on the Harthouse label, and slightly less familiar work as 246, Ringo, Prism, and Stevia, 'Magic Thread', and 'Images' sees Susumu opening up his soul.
As Susumu explains some parts of his method, although method implies a plan, which belies the wonderfully random and almost accidental nature of his melodies, I am reminded of the Aphex Twin's theory of lucid dreaming, where he claimed he wrote music in his sleep. This is a quality that Susumu's work shares. That, and the ability to master any style that he chooses to work in. His techno and house music, whilst obviously made with the intention of making people groove, always had a little extra, depth, melody, and worked on several different layers. The house music that Susumu makes is so far removed from what passes for that today, it probably shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath. While 'Magic Thread' contains elements of this, with its more electronic, structured rhythms, it is 'Images' where Susumu's imagination soars.
Acoustic fragments waft in and out of your listening window. Fragile piano melodies and almost hesitant, organ sounds gather in the corners of your consciousness.
And, just when you thought you might have grasped the thread of evolution, comes 'Nisemono No Uta', a kind of folky blues cover of Gloria Gaynor's hi-energy anthem 'I Am What I Am'.
Yes, this is where my heart lies musically, naturally, of course. Image especially. I had five original songs made in 1983 then I produced five new tracks much later from the original images. The album is the most personal I have ever made. I am making music that I want to listen to."
Communicating with Susumu - via e-mail and an interpreter- has the strange effect of making his answers to my questions mirror the nature of his music; his responses at times gaining an oddly elusive nature, like the fleeting snatches of pictures, thoughts, and ideas, that 'Images' is.
I write to Susumu, telling him that listening to these records makes me feel as though I am looking through a stranger's photo album, realising that the pictures have only half the meaning to me, as opposed to all for the owner.
"I'm glad to hear you felt that. 'Image' is an album of my memories. However, it is not all pure nostalgia, some of it is fictitious. 'Image' is a wondrous mixture of deja-vu from my childhood, and jamais-vu of my future. In 'Magic Thread' I imagined the evolution of mankind as thread, formed from hemp plant, which then weaves itself into an intricate net." •
The vocal sounds like a warbling karaoke version. It's funny, but kind of sad at the same time. This, as much as anything on the album, highlights the off kilter oddness of the collection of tracks. Their only link could possibly be the way that the melodies came to Susumu. It is a record of ultimate free thinking. The thoughts and ideas have been descending on, rather than conjured by, their composer.
I finish by asking Susumu what inspires him to keep exploring different moods and styles, to keep pushing the envelope of his creativity.
"People tend to choose music depending on time, place, or occasion, i.e. their mood. For me, it feels very normal to listen to house, ambient and classical music. When I produce, I imagine the music I want to make at that time. Then, if I can realise it in my studio with the equipment I have, I do it. A film director's theme will change constantly throughout his/her life. Picasso was always changing. I had no formal musical education. I cannot read a musical score and can hardly play the piano but I am enjoying observing how I evolve musically through my life. It feels very natural to me. Inspiration always comes from my life, and my work. Friends, DJing and all forms of media. I do, however, avoid unnecessary media information. I just input the essentials."
Steve Nicholls
April 2000