MOTHER
Susumu Yokota is no stranger to drastic change- the veteran Japanese ambient artist actually began his career in the early '90s as a techno producer. Now, after more than a decade primarily producing instrumental soundscapes, he releases Mother, a collaborative and almost entirely vocal album. Enlisting a variety of vocalists (members of U.K. outfit The Chap are the most noteworthy), Yokota has created a pleasant, albeit somewhat bland, album. The music is lovely, full of delicate arrangements and drifting pastoral synths, but the vocals add little to sonic palette; while perhaps this makes the songs more palatable for the "average" listener, it ultimately detracts from the emotional heft of the music itself.
Shawn Reynaldo
March 2009
Veteran Japanese producer Susumu Yokota has always been a prolific fellow swinging from one sound to the next with gay abandon. Yokota is at his best, though, when he's in slow-motion ambient mode and sketching atmospheric skyscrapers and sonic cathedrals. These textures form the basis of Mother, on which guest vocalists fill out a bunch of ethereal, soft-shuffle songs. Yokota has worked with Caroline Ross before and probably knows that her hushed, pure tones are perfect for The Natural Process. Elsewhere, vocalists such as Nancy Elizabeth, Efterklang's Casper Clausen and Our Broken Garden's Anna Brønsted coo away to their hearts' content. There are moments when it threatens to turn into an Enya tribute album, but Yokota has enough gumption to know exactly when to turn on and off the special effects.
Jim Carroll
If I were 16 again, and trying to put the moves on a black-eye-mascara-blotched, Twilight-consuming graveyard girl, I’d definitely put a song from Susumu Yokota’s Mother on the mix tape I’d make for her, which may seem odd to say regarding an artist whose music is usually so ebullient and sweet. Yokota’s best work, or at least what seems like his best work (the man has put out something like a million albums) operates from an itinerary of clemency and childlike wonder. Even his most somber ambiences are rarely devastating. Rather, Yokota is more reflective or passive. It’s shy kid music, fantastically so.
On Mother, he has graduated from juvenilia to the turbulence of adolescent and teenage angst, specifically a life of turmoil spent drifting off into swarming shadows, soundtracked by 4AD Records, and cluttered with scribbled poetry, Wiccan spell books, and a haze of opium. By rough estimation, Yokota was likely on the edge of teenagehood when this kind of music first emerged.
So, it’s unsurprising that he’d wish to make an album that lingers chronologically somewhere between This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End in Tears and Slowdive’s Just for a Day. It’s just slightly surprising that his personality doesn’t rub off that hard on these entries, as it does throughout the rest of his exhaustive release schedule. Perhaps it’s because Mother seems like a producer’s album, Yokota’s entries merely being a backdrop to a host of bright young guest stars.
But Yokota denizens looking for an excuse to dye their fingernails black that extends beyond the pukey schmaltz of a particular aforementioned multimedia franchise need not dismiss this project altogether. There are a handful of mighty pretty pieces of free-floating ephemera about. Yokota plays Robin Guthrie to a host of Elisabeth Frasers (Nancy Elizabeth, Kaori, Caroline Ross, Our Broken Garden’s Anna Bronsted, the Chap’s Claire Hope). This means that despite notable appearances by Casper Clausen of Efterklang and Panos Ghikas of the Chap, Mother is heavy of the X chromosome. That is to say, maternal.
“A Flower White” would probably be the first cut for the mix tape, and it’s a decided departure in its institution of guitar as the base structure of the song, a motif that looms large over Mother. The sparseness evokes the entire mass of indie minor chord fetishization in the ’90s, particularly influenced by Sonic Youth, with theremin-like high-pitched synth squabbles and pounding, ominous drums to boot. It’s followed by “The Natural Process” and “Reflect Mind”, both flowing with gorgeous waves of ethereal sound, backwards-masked tape loops, and penetrating gaseous atmospherics.
Lyrics are often sung like seraphic sirens through the forest and mist, the mothering of the title also possibly alluding to Mother Nature, particularly since we’re dealing with a more organic coven of sounds than usual here. And because of this rupture of words into wailing, the words themselves are often irrelevant.
This suite represents the album’s most significant triumphs, but its surest weaknesses bookend the album. Opener “Love Tendrilises” attempts to capture a mood halfway between the gothic gutter and the stars above Yokomota’s latter-day Shibuya-kei peers like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius. The song’s aboriginal drums and fluttering vocal backdrops are a step in the right direction, but there’s a sense that the song misrepresents the mood of the album. It’s almost as if it’s trying to ease the listener into its moodiness with an unobtrusive segue. The cautiousness does not pay off. At the other end of the album, “Warmth” is a stately bit of ambient piano noodling, appropriately warm as its title suggests, but overall ineffectual.
The lack of a solid beginning or end to Mother highlights the absence of a clear precedent or connection to the Yokota catalogue. When he dives in and assumes full genre regalia, dressing up as James Duval from any given Gregg Araki film, Yokota and the listener win out. Yokota’s music could never really be characterized as urgent or even prescient. Still, as a mimicry, it certainly trumps the revisionism Yokota lent to his awful recent cover of David Bowie’s “Golden Years”.
Still, throughout the album in question, Yokota seems to be playing the wise elder for his new friends, who get to assume the roles of the tortured teens. For all the nurturing parenting Yokota offers his cadre of guests on Mother, one hopes he’s still got some regressive yearning left in him.
Timothy Gabriele
19th July 2009
Yokota's output has been varied since the breathless breakthrough of 1999's Sakura; the sparse delirium of Grinning Catwas a particular highlight, while the lowlights belonged to some high gloss sonic wallpaper of an inescapably beige hue. In this instance, the watery ambient jazz-funk of 'Breeze' and the inconsequential waltzing of 'Tree Surgeon' typify this sort of sub-Wyndham Hill fluff, but the glacial beauties offered up elsewhere more than compensate. 'A Flower White' and 'The Natural Process' resemble nothing so much as short lived Eighties Wire associate AC Marias, all detached, devotional siren-song carried aloft on a clinical guitar purr and medievalist synths, respectively. Ethereal voices are omnipresent, marshalled as wordless mantras served up by special guests Nancy Elizabeth, Efterklang, Our Broken Garden and The Chap; and it's when Yokota lets in the cold upon these well-chosen friends that his knack of conjuring the dreamlike really coalesces into something magisterial.
James Papademetrie
January 2009
Sigh. For some reason, I’ve never really got into the music of the Japanese composer Susumu Yokota. I feel bad, because it generally seems to one of the unwritten rules that we should like his music.
And I don’t quite know what the problem is. Because I do like a lot of electronica, I’m more and more into a lot of ‘chillout’ (thanks to the musical education I have received from Mrs. 17 Seconds)…yet somehow, whilst I nod my head and say ‘it’s all very good’ this just leaves me unmoved.
Much of what he has produced could be described as being ambient, this album features a lot of vocals from a host of names that seem to be much respected – Caroline Ross, Nancy Elizabeth, Kaori, Efterklang’s Casper Clausen, Our Broken garden’s Anna Bronsted and Claire Hope and Panos Ghikas from the Chap…and I’m still not getting it.
14th March 2009
Original Review in Italian:
Lo avevamo conosciuto poco più di un anno fà con Love Or die anche se, Susumu Yokota ha già alle spalle una decina di anni di attività e una trentina di album.
Tredici tracce e sette collaborazioni tutte al femminile per la neo uscita firmata Lo Recording ma; purtroppo in questo caso non sono i numeri a far la differenza. Mother si lascia controllare e lo si dichiara apertamente già dai primi minuti dalle scelte vocali, senza nulla togliere alle preziose opzioni in talento che reggono il gioco con gradevole grazia ma, tramano inganno. E sono proprio i pieni e i vuoti, le identità in pigmenti elettroacustici e i colori che pagano il pegno, risultando o troppo accondiscendenti ( A Ray of light ) o decisamente fuori posto (Meltwater).
Ritornano i residui del Sylvian e gli anni ’90, velati tra le piste a tre di “Love Tendrilises” o dichiarati senza timore nei toccati confini d’intro ambient-house (The Natural Process) che a suo modo cerca rimedio nel dovuto giusto ordine delle cose (Breeze), tra battiti elettronici e le scritture in frequenza. C’è un po’ di dead can dance, tanto smalto dream e persino quella new age dai bozzetti angel-chic che fanno tanto Enya.
Si salvano gli accostamenti in chiaro-scuro trai riff in chitarra e il grazioso cantato di Nancy Elizabeth (A Flower White) mentre le multi-tracce in vocalità dall’approccio forse concreto (Reflect Mind) si lasciano perdere e confondere.
Congeniale a suo modo l’accostamento in percussioni e sintesi con le dualità vocali di “Suture” o le chiusure in pianoforte che nel voluto eco si lasciano contaminare dall’avanguardia; anime che sicuramente troveranno rifugio nei salotti per intellettuali cosmopoliti e stagionati.
Tirando le somme la noia fa da maestro ma, se volete proprio dirigere l’orecchio e cercare un po’ di sostegno andate verso la fine o centellinate qua e là l’ascolto dove forse emergono alcune attitudini migliori. (5.6/10)
English Translation (via Google Translate):
We first encountered him just over a year ago with *Love or Die*, though Susumu Yokota already has a decade of activity and some thirty albums under his belt.
This new release on Lo Recordings features thirteen tracks and seven all-female collaborations; unfortunately, in this instance, the numbers don't make the difference. *Mother* allows itself to be dominated—a fact made clear from the very first minutes by the vocal choices; this is not to detract from the talented artists who carry the material with pleasant grace, yet ultimately lead the listener astray. It is precisely the balance of fullness and emptiness—the identities formed by electroacoustic textures and colors—that suffers the consequences, resulting in tracks that are either too accommodating (*A Ray of Light*) or decidedly out of place (*Meltwater*).
Echoes of David Sylvian and the 90s return, whether veiled within the triple-layered tracks of "Love Tendrilises" or boldly declared in the ambient-house intro (*The Natural Process*)—which seeks to restore the natural order of things (*Breeze*) amidst electronic beats and frequency-based compositions.
There are hints of Dead Can Dance, a generous helping of dream-pop sheen, and even "angel-chic" New Age touches reminiscent of Enya.
The chiaroscuro interplay between guitar riffs and Nancy Elizabeth’s lovely vocals (*A Flower White*) stands out as a highlight, whereas the multi-tracked vocals—despite a seemingly grounded approach (*Reflect Mind*)—tend to get lost and muddled. The juxtaposition of percussion and synthesis with the vocal dualities of “Suture”—or the piano outros that, through deliberate echoes, allow themselves to be influenced by the avant-garde—is fitting in its own way; these are sounds that will surely find a home in the drawing rooms of seasoned, cosmopolitan intellectuals.
All in all, boredom reigns supreme; yet, if you really want to focus your attention and find something to latch onto, skip to the end or sample the tracks sparingly to catch the moments where the music’s better qualities perhaps shine through. (5.6/10)
Sara Bracco
2009
Japan's Susumu Yokota has blessed the world with a long, varied, and prosperous artistic career. Since the early- to mid-’90s, he has released around two dozen albums, ranging from minimal house to experimental ambient, while maintaining a profile as a DJ. Legends in their own time, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, and Thom Yorke have all showered his work with praise. While all the works I've previously heard have featured very few (if any) words outside of song titles, Mother immediately separates itself from the pack with its heavy use of vocals. The goal is noble, as Susumu doesn't merely want to recycle his back catalog to existing legions of fans.
In the press release, Yokota is quoted as saying, "I asked artists who I respect to collaborate with me to widen my own expression." And the guestlist directed to this aim is impressive. The tracklisting names the vocal assistance of Leaf's Nancy Elizabeth, Casper Clausen of Efterklang, Japanese diva Kaori, and two members of The Chap. However, even with all those names involved and Yokota's experience in the studio, there is just something a little off about Mother.
Instead of reinforcing the delicate whimsy of the electro-acoustic instrumentals, most of the vocals end up making the songs somewhat cheesy and obvious. "Reflect Mind" stands up as one of the clear highlights, largely because the vocals only consist of cooing and sighing, which match the mood of the reversing piano flowing in and out of a light synth warp rather than cluttering it with concepts and directions about how to feel. It lends itself to deeper contemplation than all the ‘open your huge shiny blue eyes/ gather all your strength’ twee rambling ever could. "Inside Foresighted" and "Warmth" also find themselves stronger for lack of words.
All told, I think "Suture" is the only lyrical track that works. Anna Bronsted (Our Broken Garden) and Casper Clamsen provide that cut with the right kind of haunting ethereality over a sparse downtempo beat, driven by hypnotically reverberated percussion, a pulsing atmosphere, ghostly guitars, and gong punctuation. The rest of the time, Nancy Elizabeth (who appears on five tracks — or someone doing their best Nancy Elizabeth impression) fails to add anything that isn't already being said by the music.
Of course, to put my prejudices on the table, Nancy bores me to tears on the best of days. She seems to have only one tone of voice, and that happens to be the tone for much of Susumu's 30th odd record. It cancels out the mood, leveling the tracks out and causing ineffectual aural doldrums. The vocals on "Suture" succeed by creating enough of a contrast with the music to establish their own presence (even though they are roughly the same as the rest of the vocals there), and, what's more, they leave enough room for the track to breathe. If given the same consideration, "12 Days 12 Nights" would easily be one of the album's best. Full marks for the effort, though. At least we know Susumu is trying his best.
Alan Ranta
It must be difficult to write good chillout music and be prolific. Surely if the music you write casts its spell effectively, you’ll be so relaxed you can’t be bothered to follow it up?
Maybe so, but that problem doesn’t seem to have befallen Susumu Yokota. He has good practice in the area, but manages to keep his finger on several pulses at once, successfully keeping up with deep house while venturing as far afield as melodic trance. On Mother he turns the volume and the tempo down for the most part, with a small gaggle of guest vocalists helping him realise his vision.
He manages to walk the fine line between chillout music that keeps you listening and washed-out textures that send you to sleep. The ethereal vocals of Nancy Elizabeth in A Flower White may split opinion, and certainly bring back echoes of Felt Mountain-era Goldfrapp, but for the much of this record Yokota keeps the electronics turning over nicely.
The Natural Process and Reflect Mind are especially good, adding edgier synths and beats to add a tension lacking elsewhere, while Breeze, one of four tracks to feature the pure tones of Elizabeth, combines a softly pulsing rhythm with gorgeous string tones.
Yokota’s practice of using several different vocalists works well, as it means the ear doesn’t become attuned to a single texture. His widescreen scoring means the subtle electronic ‘whooshes’ around the edge add real depth, casting the listener afloat as if on a slow moving boat across a lake.
At times the word ‘twee’ inevitably comes into the reckoning, particularly when Yokota uses more than one female voice or occasionally overdoes the electric piano sounds. Thankfully Efterklang vocalist Casper Clausen is on hand to add a bit of depth in the soft musing of Love Tendrilises, and the hymn-like sonorities of Suture. This is an extraordinary track, where time seems to stand still as the melody arches upward. It’s like watching the Northern Lights.
The intimacy of Yokota’s writing is ideal for late night or early morning moments, introspective but not too navel gazing, and varying the sonic picture just enough. You might not hang on to the singers’ every word, but their soft intonations hit the right emotional spot. This means that even within his prolific output, Mother makes an extremely solid addition.
Ben Hogwood
16th February 2009
The 2000s were a staggeringly productive period for Susumu Yokota. Starting off the decade by releasing one of his most gorgeous and enduring works, the majestically serene Sakura, he continued issuing albums at a rate of more than one per year, the majority of them forming a loose series of kindred but conceptually distinct explorations of similarly organic, generally hushed musical territory. As the decade drew to a close, the ever-industrious producer came up with yet another way to traverse that same terrain with Mother, his fifth release on Lo. It's not too much of a shakeup from his recent ways of doing things: for one thing, much of it continues his subtle preoccupation with triple-meter time signatures; for another, like much of his late-2000s output, it's an album of collaborations with vocalists, among them his Lo/Leaf labelmates Nancy Elizabeth, Casper Clausen of Efterklang, and Claire Hope and Panos Ghikas of the Chap, as well as Japanese singer Kaori and Yokota's frequent partner Caroline Ross. But despite being perhaps his most vocal-based and song-oriented record to date, it's also perhaps his calmest, most fully ambient outing since Sakura. Some tracks feel more than others like proper fully formed songs: the loungy bossa-like opener "Love Tendrilises," the Chap's subdued but typically curious "Tree Surgeon," and Nancy Elizabeth's "A Flower White," whose reliance on a looped acoustic guitar figure makes it one of the more pedestrian things here. But even on these more vocally overt pieces, Yokota's focus on texture and utterly relaxed pacing tends to eclipse the centrality of melody or compositional structure, making for a masterful sympathetic fusion of song and ambience. And without taking anything away from the fine contributions of his collaborators, Mother's most satisfying moments are those where the vocals are most fully subsumed into Yokota's hazy, limpid sonic meanderings, becoming just one textural strand among many. The album closes with its only fully instrumental piece, a Harold Budd-like solo piano meditation that resonates marvelously in its simplicity, in the way that even a fully enjoyable evening of socializing can make a later moment of solitude feel infinitely precious.
K. Ross Hoffman
Ready for some mass generalizations about Japanese culture by a Western writer with his head completely up his own ass? Because while researching for this review I’ve discovered that any consideration of Susumu Yokota’s prolific, perhaps seminal career as an electronic musician must make mention of the ambient arm of his music resembling Butoh dance. This, when you think about it, is about as uselessly unrevealing as saying that Tim Hecker’s music resembles maple syrup. Perhaps ambient music defies easy description because there isn’t a singer yelping their thoughts in clumsy literalisms all over the place. Perhaps music writers are lazy.
For one thing, Yokota isn’t ambient. It’s true that his music is dichotomous, seemingly torn between traditional hook-laden techno (is techno old enough to be called traditional yet?) and the repetitive, hushed arrangements associated with ambience. But Yokota allows the obsessive constructedness, the uplift of his house music (Cat, Mouse and Me [1997]; 1999 [1999]; Magic Thread [2000]; Will [2001]) to encircle his ambient tendencies in a way that supports it about as effectively as string around a shattered bone. And it’s between these two impulses, contrapuntal though they are (god, I’m trying not to type yin-and-yang), that he’s seemed to swing for fifteen years.
Mother falls solidly on the ambient side of Yokota’s catalogue, with The Boy and the Tree (2002), Grinning Cat (2001), and the still lovely Sakura (2000). One resorts to conversation of his nationalism not because it leaves an indelible mark on his music, though the house and ambient scene in Japan is interesting and surely worthy of discussion somewhere if not here. One speaks of Yokota’s music being Japanese because a) he’s been mechanically releasing this music, with tiny variations, for so many years that he’s as much a contributor to the culture of Japanese electronic music as that culture is to his music, and b) he leaves little else upon which to base the discussion. Hecker begs a discussion of utopianism; Keith Fullerton Whitman builds monuments to terror-ridden distortion so that he can cascade them in chunks down on his listeners’ heads; Stars of the Lid are like watchmakers who meticulously assemble their love letters to time; Fennesz takes years to put out his records. Yokota, on the other hand, names his new album Mother and introduces a woman’s vocals.
The problem with relegating this record to the waste bin on these accords is that he’s also been at this game too damn long to misstep in any painfully obvious way. The album may not be a grower, but it does click along at an undeniably confident pace. The three chord guitar line in “Breeze” may be predictable, but Yokota knows enough not to discount it for that alone, and actually makes it a prime element in the song’s immaculate construction. That by song’s end Mother‘s weakest track is recoverable is itself testament to Yokota’s gradual transformation from enthusiastic fan with no sense of self-editing to careful planner with an innate ear. It may be hard to justify when I say that Mother ends up as consistent an album as Sakura, but it sure feels right.
So, for all intents and purposes, perhaps it is useful to compare Yokota’s ambient music to Butoh dance. Maybe our cultural interpolation of Yokota and Mother as another in his series of lockstep movements, as a mesh of stereotypes and primary colors, is as important as the music itself—more even than the degree to which that can be said about any album, any commercial, any bit of noise made by a passing train. Yokota has carved out a niche for himself far bigger than music this binary has a right to and, even more impressive, has legitimized it. The music is unchallenging, pleasant, and enjoyable. All that’s left is for us to problematize it.
Conrad Amenta
13th March 2009
In the last month I have lazed on a beach under equatorial heat and braved the disappointingly feeble, yet perilously icy, British winter. With me in both scenarios (and a number betwixt) has been Yokota’s lovely Mother.
I don’t know how many memos, or albums, I have missed since Susumu was banging out hit after hit on the Leaf label, but I’m sure he used to be more ambient than this. You know the score: plaintive notes stretched over bone-white backgrounds that you listened to while your shaggy post-metal beard was in its philosophical goatee stage. You looked up from the current issue of Jalouse that you were idly thumbing in the Waterstone’s coffee shop as a certain sonic detail caught your attention. And then back to your consideration of minimalist orange chairs.
But things change, and so does Yokota. It probably wasn’t his intention to release a 1980s goth-pop album, but that’s what he has done. More precisely, it sounds like a collection of late 1990s goth-metal ballads. Like if Paradise Lost circa One Second had dropped the guitars entirely and hired the singer from The Gathering. (I hate those multi-band comparisons too, but this is so goth-metal ballads.)
If you’re not a fan of goth-metal – if not, why not? – don’t let this description turn you off. Mother just as quickly recalls a less crystalline, but equally stillness-of-winter Vespertine. It has the forlorn beauty of a crisp January morning; the kind where it seems the cold has become so pronounced as to freeze the moment entirely. The thinnest twigs on trees live-pause with semi-frozen droplets just begging to plunge to the damp floor below as the closest thing to a sound is your breath escaping you in condensation. That kind of winter stillness.
There is even a hint of Herbert’s relaxed jazztronica here. ‘Love Tendrilises’, in addition to an awkwardly poetic title, boasts keys and synth-string swells, as vocals sigh declarations of love in the daze of a thousand Sunday morning yawns. It’s the Independent, under the covers, in a city-centre flat. Keep the Eggs Benedict runny, darling.
Though I try to avoid such a damning statement, even don’t intend it as a slight, this is rather dinner party stuff. But you could level that accusation at Herbert, Frou Frou and Red Snapper, and they’ve put out some quality over the years.
Yokota avoids this with the Depeche-goes-doom of ‘A Flower White’ or ‘Suture’ with their respectively bizarre vocal melodies, percussion of distant approaching armies and the kind of general ambient menace that wouldn’t surprise you if it turned up on the next sunnO))) album. This kind of thing is certainly at odds with the pristine aesthetic the cover and Björkisms suggest. They certainly add depth and an element of surprise.
Occasionally the vocals grate, such as the too-high notes on ‘A Flower White’, but they are generally of such timbre to complement the synthesised naturalism, the warm romanticism, of the tones while never threatening to steal the show. They are a microcosm of Mother: a lovely – if emotionally confusing – way to spend an hour that edifies without changing your life.
13th February 2009