Mother

Volume 1 - Album 5

Yokota's most intriguing album featuring some of his most beautiful and enduring compositions.

A1: Love Tendrilses
A2: Breeze
A3: A Ray of Light
A4: A Flower White

B1: The Natural Process
B2: Reflect Mind
B3: Inside Foresighted

C1: Meltwater
C2: Tree Surgeon
C3: Suture

D1: Bonda
D2: 12 Days 12 Nights
D3: Warmth

Including an essay by Joe Muggs in the liner notes...

... “ Susumu Yokota has made many: records that seem to exist outside of time, that short circuit your expectations about the hows and whens of musical influence, that seem to have been uncovered – like some hidden elegant law of geometry – rather than made. And oddly, though you might think that this is more likely to apply to the most minimalist, abstracted compositions most of all, it’s true of Yokota’s most song-based, collaborative, human album ‘Mother’ as much as or even more than any of his other works.”....

Mother is a study of contemporary ballads; a haunting, temporally detached sequence of spectral pop songs, featuring gossamer vocal contributions from Efterklang's Caspar Klausen, Our Broken Garden's Anna Bronsted and The Leaf Label’s Nancy Elizabeth. It echoes Yokota's late-2000s tropes, triple-metre time signatures and the liberal integration of voices. The songs of these contributors are his new emotional pivot, amplified with delightful dexterity, a testament to his enduring vitality and ability to shapeshift. The ever-relentless producer adapts his sonic palette to provide subtle, cushioned soundbeds for the singers, retracting the spatial anomalies and trippily applied artefacts of his earlier work without compromising his fingerprint. He steps back from the fore to create a collectivist artistic statement. The edges are soft, the mixture bound and glazed in a oneness which foregrounds every contributor evenly and morphs smoothly from one gentle, tactile form to the next.

Opening with the gentle yet buoyant ‘Love Tendrilises’, the most overtly poppy cut on the album, what follows is a submersion. Gentle 3/4 rhodes phrases propping up pensive, Stereolab-adjacent vocal back and forth - a carefree effervescence before ‘Breeze’ sets the tone for the rest, drawing pulsing sine tones, mournful strings and submerged percussion. The record shifts and the ornate arrangements melt, more weightless. There is a magisterial yearning across ‘A Ray of Light’, Nancy Elizabeth’s glossy vocals over wandering bass notes. Highlight ‘A Flower White’ is undercut by an insistent, dour, Sonic Youth- channelling rhythm section, with the eventual exposition of tangled synth lines raising the temperature. ‘Reflect Mind’ and ‘Bonda’ are airy and atmospheric, the voice is a central poetic device against a backdrop of blurring reverie. ‘The Natural Process’ is an orbital midpoint, past nebulous vocal clouds and above a slow, metallurgic dub techno churn. The excellent ‘Meltwater’ opens with a passage of Yokota’s signature cut n’ paste hand percussion ostinatos, before opening out into misty eyed Cocteau Twins frisson, and the kooky triplet plod of ‘Tree Surgeon’ cannily prefaces the brooding, cinematic ‘Suture’, balancing swirling percussion, resonant harmonic clouds and eerie octaved vocals and calling to mind Roy Montgomery’s drone-folk evocations. The closer, ‘Warmth’ is a remarkable moment, an aching solo piano piece drawing the listener right back from their terrestrial course to their seat.

The ethereal voices are omnipresent, understated yet transfixing. Mother flies the closest to Yokota’s foundational fondness for the jangly, gothic guitar dirges of 4AD or Creation’s early signings since his nascent guitar sketches on Image, and yet he wears this influence lightly, delicately arranging a metamorphosis across a new terrain. Pure, foregrounded twangs of minimally treated guitars with a carefully curated palette of unconventional textural tools, from nasal drones to expansive sheet-metal stabs. As exemplified throughout the Skintone series, Yokota’s unabashed references to the past manage to evade nostalgia or recycling. The architecture of the riffs and the pierce of the vocals on Mother are honed to edify, slotting in comfortably alongside much of the filigree folktronica of the music blogspot era but always reaching beyond. His dance is anachronistic and subtle, transgressing the known.