Wider Press
Susumu Yokota
Calm and movement: the bookish Susumu Yokota.
A shy technocrat of the ambient/ dancefloor crossover, 41-year-old Susumu Yokota's prolific
career took wing in 1992 when German 'trancelord' Sven Vath released the bespectacled Tachikawa resident's fledgling mantras on Frankfurt's Eye-Q label. Subsequently Yokota has
lived a double musical life, churning out every variety of beat-laden house or sub-house styles (often under splendidly gauche aliases like Ringo, Prism or Sonicsufi) for various international labels, while attending to an ever more bewitching series of ethereal ambient releases for London's Leaf label and Japan's Reel Musiq. It's a division of labour the man obviously relishes: "The two cannot be separated, they are like Yin and Yang, calm and movement, or the body and the mind. It feels natural for me to do both dance and ambient, it's a balance that already exists within me."
Yokota's ambient LPs - particularly 2000's plaudit-garnering Sakura - bulge with pointillist whirls of sound, lovingly teased from threads of guitar and electric piano, that recall the most beauteous moments on Brian Eno's Another Green World or Harold Budd's Luxa. But Yokota maintains that his influences lie elsewhere. "I was initially only interested in things like Marcel Duchamp's ready-made artworks, and only later started making tracks because I was fascinated by the sampling techniques in house music", is all he will vouchsafe. And as for the 'Japanese-ness' of his sound: "I don't try to express it, but it appears in my music naturally. I try not to be tied by any styles and express freely. This is in common with many Japanese today, it is each one's personality now."
Sakura (Leaf,2000)
A gorgeous cloud of music. Echoing Fender Rhodes and sampled strings with enough
grit to locate the music at a safe distance from ambient blandness.
David Sheppard
1998
With our new digitized, hyper-informed century underway, genre collision in music - the blending and clashing of musical forms previously considered distinct unto themselves – seems to be occurring with more and more regularity. Today traditionally academic composition techniques such as the gamelan-inspired minimalism of Steve Reich are found flirting with hip-hop, the ghostlike echoes of Jamaican dub are found merging with the quantized rhythms of techno and acoustic guitars traditionally used in folk and blues traditions are incorporated into electronic compositions.
This continual dialogue however takes an interesting twist in Susumu Yokota’s case. Yokota, who has become one of Japan’s most prolific and esteemed electronic artists, enjoys creating expectations in listeners before hitting us sidelong with a gentle but firm jab to the chin. Although Yokota’s recordings borrow from house, ambient, disco, postrock, minimalism and techno at will, the uniqueness found in Yokota’s recordings come less from such genre fusions than his music’s unique juxtaposition of “good” and “bad” taste. Playing with the distinctions we make between things, his approach combines earnestness and absurdity.
Yokota's approach suggests a Houdini act of sorts. Composing within a particular style's recognized boundaries, he gives the impression of allowing them to bind him down. But just when you think he's been quelled by their rules and regulations, the chains break, the cage magically opens, and Yokota comes out unscathed. It feels as if Yokota is smiling a wry grin as he knits his compositions into a unique and especially mesmerizing fabric. It's a magic trick he has mastered.
Mostly known in the Western Hemisphere as a purveyor of leftfield atmospherics, Yokota could be seen to be taking part in a conceptual music lineage founded by French composer and prankster Erik Satie. Satie, who specialized in sparse and somber solo piano works that used silence to great affect - referring to his work as musique d'ameublement (or "furniture music") in recognition of furniture's subtle influence on our environment whether we are aware of its presence or not - is often recognized as the progenitor, or indeed, first practitioner of ambient, or incidental music. Satie's concept was famously appropriated by Brian Eno for his various theses on ambient music, and Yokota adds new contradictions to the dialog his two predecessors began.
As opposed to the sustained moods Satie and Eno exercised, however, Yokota's work changes your reception of it often. Take the song "Shinsen" from last year's Sakura, where a delicate harp loop bends outwards, greeted ever so gradually by a billowing analog synth, before intertwining in a pointillist synth staccato. Its nods to Steve Reich, Cluster, and Eno may not be the most novel of reference points. And indeed, it occasionally veers dangerously close to New Age. But such tendencies are idiosyncrasies in Yokota's work. Funny, absurd, cheesy, yet utterly gorgeous, Yokota's track seems to be fucking with us for a laugh.
"Beauty is boring," he deadpans via e-mail from his studio in Tokyo’s Tachikawa-city suburb. "[Beauty] has no imagination if it can't hold its opposite next to it. That's why I think it's important to consciously include irony and paradox in my work. Even children are not only pretty beings. They're more complicated than that. They are free and sensitive, but also cruel."
Yokota's statement is emblematic of his methodology, approaching 2oth-century idioms in a fashion akin to, and influenced by, Pop Art, Dada, and Surrealism. Indeed, although his first musical forays occurred as a 10-year-old armed with an acoustic guitar, Yokota's professional background was as an artist. "As a job, I first did visual art," he says. "And though I find it very hard to explain in words, my visual art and my music are very affected by the other."
"The fusion of avant garde and pop has been a major theme in my work. And I feel it is quite clear the way Pop Art and house music have a point of contact in 'sampling.' I think [Marcel] Duchamp's Readymades dealt with this explicitly."
Take Yokota's recent album Grinning Cat for example. A reference to Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, it's also loaded with associations to head shops. Yokota, perhaps drawing a link to his own cheshire personality creates a surreal and chimerical tone that delights in its flights of fancy. The most recent of his ambient releases Grinning Cat is the latest in a series of recordings for Britain's Leaf records that began with 1998's Magic Thread, the
retrospective Image 1983-1999 – which found Yokota presenting five early guitar and organ works in their original form before forming the remaining part of the album with various reworkings/remixes of that material - and Sakura.
Nonetheless, since his immersion in electronic music in the early' 90s, Yokota has pursued a distinctly varied and prolific output that has resulted in, at last count, 20 albums, not to mention countless 12-inches and compilation appearances. Indeed, in his native Japan, he is one of his country's bestknown practitioners of a stylish and joyful deep house (released on Sublime and Harthouse records under various guises including Ringo, Prism, and Stevia) he began making early in the last decade.
"I started programming with a computer because I was fascinated with acid house at the end of the '80’s" he explains. "After my position as art-director was terminated, in 1991, I started to make music since I had the time. Initially, I didn't think I could be a musician." Despite his modesty, it only took a little over a year for Yokota to gain the attention of the German king of trance himself, Sven Vath, who heard a bootleg and signed Yokota to the Harthouse label. Through Vath and the reception of Yokota's consequent debut album, the aptly titled Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection, Yokota became the first Japanese DJ to play Berlin's famed Love Parade. Any doubts that a composer capable of such whimsical minimalist delicacy can rock a party of thousands need only listen to his longplayer Will, where Yokota glides through a postdisco house fervor amid rollicking breakbeats.
Here, the solitary contemplation featured on his Leaf albums finds its extroverted kin. Predecessor to Will – which include last year's Zero, the third of Yokota's "year series" following 1998 and 1999 - also find Yokota flexing his New York garage skills, combining elements of Joe Clausell, early Trax recordings, and the funky-ass bass licks of early Kerri Chandler. Like Chandler, Yokota approaches his house material with a distinctly textural approach, creating a warm "live" sound, with sunny piano glissandos and drifting bell patterns.
You can hear it on cuts like "Fake Funk," where his use of live percussion draws a lineage between late- '7os garage legends and the broken-beat sound gaining popularity of late. Perhaps it's not surprising then to find the likes of Compost's Kyoto Jazz Massive remixing Yokota on Zero Remixes, an album that also features techno-prankster Si Begg, Roy Davis J r., and Bugz in the Attic.
With Leaf records just now beginning to release Yokota's club-related material, he seems destined to attract a far larger and more diverse audience, which can only make him happy. After all, the more people he mesmerizes with his hypnotic beats and melodies, the wider his grin becomes.
Issue 7
Alex Georgopoulos
2001
HOUSE
Set to throw a global party
His latest release looks sure to boost this Tokyo sound artist’s growing worldwide following.
Susumu Yokota's new CD, "zero," is a brilliant showcase of the Tokyo sound creator's artistic endeavors, which reveals him stripped of experimental masks and all set to throw a party. Like fellow Japanese DJs Ken Ishii and DJ Krush before him, Yokota has a big following in Europe, though the hypnotic non-stop funky grooves pulsating through "zero" show he's now quite capable of taking on the world as well.
All the tracks on "zero"-released here this week, and worldwide next month-including the opener "Go Ahead," with its contagious "move your body" vocal refrains, and the equally catchy "Come On My World," reveal a mature and positive mind-set at play behind the decks. But having turned 40 this year, Yokota is not wasting any time either. In the last two years, he has released a steady flow of albums-including "image," "sakura," and his celebrated "1999"-but judging from U.S. and British critics' praises, his speedy delivery comes with quality guaranteed.
However, Yokota seemed in no great hurry himself when he dropped by the Sublime label office last week for a chat. As he said, he's been "comfortably making a living" off his music for the past five years-while also being able to express himself in more experimentally challenging ways through his own label, Skintone, which he launched two years ago.
Nonetheless, his enviable luxuries today are without doubt the hard-earned fruits of a decade's labors. "I used to be a free-lance graphic designer in Tokyo, but when the economic bubble burst, I found my job offers were dwindling as well," says Yokota in his simple, straightforward fashion. "Since I had more time to myself, I began to work on programmed music and beats."
What is all the more impressive is how, a year later, Yokota began handing out DAT tapes of his songs to foreign DJs passing through Tokyo. Masterful touch
In 1993, this eventually landed him a contract with the German techno label Harthouse, and an invitation to DJ at Berlin's million strong Love Parade techno festival-all without moving a single step out of Japan.
It goes without saying that Yokota's career has benefited greatly from his masterful touch on the turntables, and indeed his DJ skills have been kept well honed-not just at home, but across Europe too. Nowadays, apart from studio work, his diary is dotted with party DJ dates, and he is frequently invited overseas to tour along with some of techno' s finest, including Jeff Mills, Luke Slater and Kraftwerk.
"I don't buy too many records these days, maybe 20 singles a month," he said. "I'm not really listening for a good song or a bad song. I just buy what I can use on the dancefloor as a DJ, so this process of choosing records has become almost a creative process in itself."
Techno music has long been in the creator's blood, as he cites '80s technopop bands like Joy Division and New Order as his early musical influences. However, the first record he bought may, perhaps, reveal the roots of his more recent leanings toward warmer, earthbound sounds.
"The first record I bought was by the Carpenters when I was 10 years old," he recalled, adding, "I remember hitting pots and pans with chopsticks like drums when I was a kid."
Nowadays, those primitive tools have long since been replaced by digital ones like the Akai S5000 sampler, and his current latest fancy, the Pro Tools software for Macintosh.
Even his previous job as a graphic designer has been reaping its own rewards in Yokota's musical world of late. "For the last two to three years my lifestyle in music has started to settle down, so I'm trying to get back into some graphic design," he said with obvious enthusiasm. Both the cover of his latest album and the inner sleeves feature his own (non-digital) photographic artwork. Next month is the maestro's first gallery opening, "Susumu Yokota Art Works," in Tokyo's Aoyama. Given Yokota's get-up-and-go and zeal for creativity, this latest artistic venture could likely be the start of yet another successful career.
Susumu Yokota will tour Japan alongside Max Brennan and Fretless AZM on Sublime's "ZERO" tour. They will play in Hiroshima at 1 O p.m. June 30 at Chinatown (082-247-5270). They then move to Osaka for a show at 9 p.m. July 1 at Karma (06-6344-6181), a five-minute walk from JR Kitashinchi Station. The next show then is in Sapporo at 9 p.m. July 7 at Precious Hall
(011-513-2221), before the tour returns to Tokyo for a final show at Aoyama Cay (03-3498-5790), near Omotesando subway station.
"Susumu Yokota Art Works" runs from July 7 to 16 at Aoyama Free Space 3. For more information contact Sublime at 03-5468-5666.s
BY KEN KAWASHIMA
JUNE 2000
It so turns out that Susumu Yokota is a very interesting man. Since his musical debut, the 1992 Harthouse 12” Frankfurt – Tokyo Connection, Yokota has released some 13 albums and 15 12”s. working under various names, including Ringo, Prism and 246, and for various labels, including Sublime, Reel Musiq and his own Skintone Label he has found the time to exhibit his visual artwork in Tokyo. Most of the music is a kind of positive disco techno, but his Skintone catalogue has recently been licensed by London’s Leaf, bringing the ambient side of Yokota to the fore.
The first of the Skintone/Leaf releases is Images, 1983-1998, a collection of short miniatures, composed in two different time periods. Tracks 1-5 were recorded with guitar and organ between 1983-4 and tracks 6-12 were composed through 97-98, being inspired by the earlier material. This strange and beautiful record is like a musical scrapbook or photo album, which is appropriate, because for Yokota, there is a very close connection between music, memory and his extremely active visual imagination: “When I was three, I felt it was a miracle to listen to my voice recorded on the tape recorder. When I was eight, I saw visually the music of Saint-Saens the French 19ths century composer, poet and dramatist. Ten years ago, sound became visual. The rhythm of house was jumping with the shape of shrimps.”
The sleeve notes to Images gives an insight into the mysterious process at the heart of Yokota’s music making: “Encountering Acid House made me visualise music – I could clearly see the sounds sparkling… this experience led me to create electronic music. From that time after, my life became techno.” It would see that for Yokota, sound is a connector and conductor – it reforms the scattered particles of his memory just for an instant, and through this process, he creates music.
The second Skintone/Leaf release, Magic Thread, is altogether different. 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.
With his third and most recent Skintone release, Sakura, Yokota moves into yet another plane. This time, the artwork is calm, plain white, overlaid with a finely coloured painting of birds and flowers.
“The visual work of the CD jacket reflects the concept of each album,” he says, “A painting of birds reflects what my heart and emotions feel for nature.” Like the art, the sound of the album is bright, positive and very open. If Magic Thread depicts an urban landscape and industry, Sakura echoes open countryside and sunlight. The mystical theme, that runs through Sakura is reflectd in the titles to the tracks: Shinsen (God’s Spring), Hagoromo (A Robe of Feathers), or Azukiro No Kaori (A Perfume The Colour of Red Beans). The record is bursting with ideas: from the opening track Saku (bloom), a simple collage of gentle guitar, string sample, and sparkly little electronic sounds, to Naminate (wave), a weave work of jazz drum break, repeated piano chords, and marimba (kind of Steve Reich meets Dave Brubeck armed with a sampler). Sounds shimmer and sparkle with a magical property, a kind of brightness and sonic intensity – with truly beautiful mixing.
For Yokota, both art and music are self-creating, possessing almost magical powers. “If you pursue art or music, something like a spirit comes into existence in the work, and that music or art possess the miracle power in itself,” he explains. “I am always so happy when a picture or album is completed.”
Jonathan Hughes
Vol1, No.5
2000
Brian Sweeny
September 1999
From disco to house to trance and techno, from breakbeat and funk to acoustic/electronic experimentalism Japan's Susum Yookota has been makinq cool sounds for over 16 years. Yet he's only now being noticed in the West. Jonas Stone praises one of the world's most versatile talents. Photos: Brian Sweeny
Susumu Yokota could well be the most versatile artist yet to emerge from Japan's Far-Eastern shores. For starters he's had more record labels than Dean Saunders has football clubs and his dynamic range of releases range from Germanic techno trance for Sven Vath's Harthouse as Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection to Prism's Detroit-inspired staccato-funk for Japan's Sublime. Then of course we musn't forget Ringo's floor-filling electronics on Sublime's sister label Reel Musiq, Yokota's breakbeat experimentalism for Harthouse UK, Stevia's twiddlings for NS-Com and his more recent interest in disco-fuelled house under his own full name. Yet none of the above compare to the dexterous texture and beauty incarnate that is his own Skintone label, for which he has made soft and warm reflections of Japanese and electronic/acoustic guitar music since 1983. Cunningly picked up by the UK's ever daring Leaf label, 'Image 1983 - 1998' provides further insight into the mind-frame of an artist who first visualised acid house as "shrimps jumping up and down!" Yes mate.
"I can express myself more freely on Skintone as it is totally my own label," explains Yokota. "I can do whatever I feel like. With Sublime, for example, there is a label colour so I would be making something within that identity. It's not like I consider myself as an artist or a producer but the name changes are due to me releasing material on different labels and my continual experimentation with the sort of direction that I want to head in."
Indeed, Skintone appears to be more a personal expression of Yokota himself. Mild-mannered and genteel, his softly spoken words carry the serene air of someone content with their lot.
Somehow the sound of Skintone defines Yokota perfectly, as if years of soul searching have finally been laid to rest. "I have more of an idea about what I want to do musically so I feel more comfortable," he offers in humble, translated tones.
A few hours later Yokota delivers a thunderous DJ display of discofied house as he opens the show for Tokyo's Future Music Festival. Behind black-rimmed spectacles and neatly pressed apparel he nonchalantly flicks between records whilst 2,000 Japanese dubbers peel themselves from the walls. A far cry from his odd and experimental Skintone introspection, Yokota packs in plenty of his own house-inspired material that recently surfaced on this year's aptly titled '1999' long-player for Japan's Sublime stable.
Fittingly it sits between last year's '1998' and next year's imminent '2000'. "I choose to title my recent albums by the year they are released because we are coming towards the end of the century and I wanted to see or show how I evolved at this time," states Yokota. "I always liked new wave and alternative music, which for me had an end of the century feeling to it. So as we are nearly there I wanted to keep that thought inside me and develop it."
With Japan spearheading the charge into the next millennium via its relentless pursuit of making technology smaller, quicker and ridiculously efficient, one wonders if their own collectively cultured exploits can keep up with the capital's breakneck pace?
"There are a lot of new independent labels in Japan,' observes Yokota. "A lot of them are not yet known outside Japan but there are a lot of people doing something very new and unique." And if Yokota's own catalogue of creativity is anything to go by, then '2000' should be full of Far-Eastern promise.
Jonas Stone
September 1999
Tetsuro Sato
Classical music meets club vibes in live remix
Sunday sees a meeting of minds when some of Tokyo's club music artists perform together with those of a different musical background – a young classical orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic. "Classic Club Remix," to be held at the Triphony Hall in Sumida Ward, aims to bring together two fields of music often seen to hold little in common. Leading techno artist Susumu Yokota and American Chris Case, a 30-odd-year resident of Japan, will be remixing classical pieces to be played live by the orchestra. The word "remix" may be a little misleading here. It is not the usual kind of remixing, which utilizes sampling and other recording techniques.
Rather, it will be a live reworking of a piece of music for the purpose of performance. This will involve the artists taking a piece of classical music, choosing a part (possibly a phrase or section) to develop and then making a demo tape of the reworked piece. Then a new score will be written which, together with the demo tape for reference, will be handed over to the conductor to be played by the orchestra. A complicated process, you may think, and to what purpose? For Yokota it is a good opportunity to introduce classical music to those more accustomed to jumping up and down at a club instead of clapping politely at a concert hall.
"I mainly listened to club music and new wave for a long time, until the past few years when I started listening to more jazz and classical, and found that I really enjoyed it," Yokota says. "Young people often have the impression that classical music is serious and dry, but really it is freer than techno which is a lot more rigid in structure. Freer in the sense that the composer and especially the conductor are able to develop, emphasize and improvise in a manner that is difficult for most techno musicians."
"We have chosen pieces that are closer to the modern extreme of classical music," Case says. "I am remixing a piece from Wagner's 'Ring' cycle, and Yokota is remixing Erik Sa tie's 'Gymnopedies.' Satie's 'furniture music' was... moving away from 'classical' and was a precursor of what is called ambient today." Case adds that he is more interested in the concept. "I believe that nothing is essentially 'contradictory' except in people's conceptions of them, in which case they are purely intellectual contradictions," he says.
Having mixed classical bits into DJing sessions in Japan and Bali, Case is no stranger to the concept. At its worst it is "a pastiche," he says; at its best it moves toward an integration of supposedly incompatible forms. This integration involves, in one section of Yokota's piece, the layering of break beats (sampled rhythms from old soul, jazz or hip-hop records) over just three notes from Satie's "Gymnopedies." "I hope it will have more of a groove than a lot of 'techno' music,"
He says. "It should have more of an acid jazz feel to it- club music in its wider sense." Yokota's work will likely be the more direct and easy to grasp· of the two, and Case's more difficult. Or perhaps not.
“What I am doing with Wagner's 'Ring' is exploring the repetition of just one leitmotif, and building a celestial flow of shifting harmonies," Case says. "In this sense it is already close to ambient in that there is less importance on form and more focus on psychic communication. I think music should be judged primarily by its effect on the psyche of the listener and only secondarily as an art form."
Conducting both works will be Yoko Matsuo, one of only a few women conductors in Japan, but also one of the most famous. "Well, I had never really listened to much club music as such before this project, so I have had to input new sounds, which has opened me up somewhat," she says. "Before I heard the demo tapes I expected the techno elements might throw the structure of the classical pieces off balance, but actually they seem to work really well together.''
In addition to his reworking of Wagner, Case will also do an ambient music set. He, with kota and the orchestra will be complemented by Japanese DJ and musician Hanno. rumor has it that Hanno's will lean toward the noisy industrial side of ambient music, but nobody seems to know for sure. Whether this ambuguity is simple evasive or part of the mood of revised performance is for you to find out.
Jeff Hammond
SITTING in a plush. almost airport-lounge style coffee shop laced by seven Japanese techno producers who don't really speak English. Talking through our interpreter Mick, counterman at Cisco Records, Tokyo's only techno store. In Shibuya, one of Tokyo's main neon-lit shopping centres. The producers sit politely, waiting for their turn, chatting quietly amongst themselves, although some have never met before. Shoppers wonder through the rain, coffee cups clatter almost inaudibly, a peaceful sense of order, escape from the electric city chaos outside, prevails.
Earlier we have walked for half an hour through the placid Sunday afternoon rain to reach a temple, where we took photos. Sakuma, Cisco's manager, who has arranged this gathering of Tokyo's techno cognoscenti, had thoughtfully provided umbrellas. En route, Mick whispered that he thought it strange no one in our party had attempted to talk to us. As this diverse band of producers posed in the twilight in the temple courtyard, the guard came to shoo us away - the temple was about too close. Being Japanese, I suppose, and coming from a much more regimented society, their instinct was to leave on command and they turned as one to go. Being English, I suppose, ours was to cajole, argue, push the time limit as long as possible, and we persuaded them to stay. Cultural differences, language barriers, confusion and politeness; that's how etiquette varies in different time zones. Techno, having no respect for time or language or laws, flies over those differences. And it's techno we're here to talk about. I'm sitting in front of a bunch of guys dressed so nondescriptly, so normally, that to me they look like they could be anything, do anything, work in a shoe shop or pilot an aeroplane - anything but produce weird, wonderful, frightening, touchingly romantic, at times plain insane techno records. But what do I know? I'm not just in another country, Japan is so strange that I feel like I'm on another planet.
And as one by one the producers slide into the seat between me and Mick, as we struggle through the language gap and instead talk about Detroit and Roland and the international language of music, then those self-same cultural differences slip away and personalities,
stories, lives and a love of the endless electronic groove take their place.
"Since Japanese techno doesn't have a drug scene, it's different.”
JAPANESE techno is different, not always radically different, just subtly, neatly, warily different. It's also increasingly excellent. Be it the tiny shards of discordant melody that Ken Ishii, Japan's Aphex Twin, drops all over R&S releases like 'Garden On The Palm', or the delicate yet frantic trance of Dream Punk's 'The Joker' on the Torema label, or the lush, sentimental melodies of Mind Design's 'View From The Edge' CD on Transonic, Japanese techno is becoming a new, polite, yet strident voice in iniernational techno.
It's also a very thoughtful music and they love slogans and concepts. "Mad sound with energy from the chaos," it says on every Torema release. "Future Electronic Music," announce the Subvoice labels. "From the bedroom to the whole universe," declare the sleeves from the Frogman label, whose owm compilation is carries the same name. And resourceful, it is impossible to press vinyl in Japan so Japanese labels press-up their records in the UK, then re-import them. "I think the sound itself is different," says Keiko Suzuki, a London-based journalist working for Japan's Ele-King and Remix magazines. "Old traditional Japanese music sounds very sentimental. So they use that. And they use video game sounds. So there's two streams. They're very Westernised."
"We shouldn't just import trends and DJs from abroad with 'strong Japanese yen'."
Sakuma's Subvoice label likewise now has a UK outlet through Happy Daze distribution. Last Summer they put out their first release, the deranged yet perfectionist chaos of From Time To Time's 'From Time To Time’. There’s the Sublime, Frogman, Syzygy and Transonic labels, plus Rising High's Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection and R&S/Apollo's Meditation YS. There's a small yet
potentially powerful scene here.
'
When I was young, I listened to punk rock," recalls the genial Sakuma, who records and performs live as Future Electronic Music. "I liked all electronic music. I like music that has energy. In house, I felt more energy than in any other kind. Now I'm most interested in techno because techno is changing all the time, changing its form." And there’s a hardcore Japanese techno following: the morning Sakuma first opened Cisco's techno shop last October, 100 customers were stood outside. Even today, on a Sunday afternoon the shop is lull of techno heads, browsing through the shelves of pure, high quality, international techno. Visiting artists have covered the walls with their autographs in silver and gold magic marker: Alter Ego, Lenny Dee, Lazonby, Dave Clarke, Jeff Mills, Mad Mike, Resistance D, it's a roll call of cred. Behind the counter are two decks and a Pioneer CD mixer, a girl at a computer and a telephone.
At 4am that morning, in a small, white, basement club ....
(Partial Feature, Incomplete text)
Susumu shows his roots
SUSUMU YOKOTA is one. of Japan’s biggest house/techno djs and, after Ken Ishii, was the first Japanese techno producer to have his music released in Europe. Over the years he has laboured under a number of names, (246, Ringo, Prism and Stevia) and for numerous labels, (Sublime, Reel Musiq and Harthouse). He is perhaps best known for his 1992 Frankfurt/Tokyo Connection release on Sven Vath's Harthouse label. In recent years however his music has been turning in old directions, "Acid house was really fresh and shocking for me and it was the thing that changed my consciousness and my life.
After Acid House in the late 80's many exciting sounds were coming up, but from around 97 the scene became boring and I couldn't find any freshness in what was there, therefore, I felt freshness in the music of the past, which are my roots."
We speak through a loop of e-mails and Facimiles, translated back and forth. The music he speaks of belongs to a more. innocent/ambient side of Susumu.
In the, early eighties Yokota was creating intricate little compositions that seemed to live and breath through a weaving instrumental mix. The release of Image 1983-1998 through his own Skintone label and licenced for the UK by the Leaf Label saw him revisit this sound placing pieces recorded then, side by side with fresh compositions created similar perspective. He has since followed with two successive albums, Magic Thread and Sakura. These have seen his sound progress in sophistication and Subtlety, the melody growing more subliminal more therapeutically ambient.
“My music has developed with era. Both I and music change. I am still in a process where I have to handle techniques and gear. I cannot say anything specific but I want to express myself in original ways. Music is one of the ways I express myself. Music is indispensable for me.”
In his time Yokota has explored many side of the musical spectrum, “I want to touch and use genres which I am interested in and feel something in.
Working on different style you are interested in means they can influence each other in some way and freshness is born. At one time I made drum and bass which would influence me when creating house. Also, when I work on tracks with no beat I start to want to make dance music.”
“I can identify myself more because I am enriched musically. I think it is best if I can be myself in any genre.”
For someone who has taken the time to review his musical career to date I wondered how he view his creation,
“They are incomplete, but I have my own world which nobody possesses. I have plenty of energy which will create and release my work.”
With the Leaf Label releasing his ambient works within the UK Susumu Yokota is enjoying huge critical acclaim. To finish I asked him what ambitions he had remaining. His answer is simple, ‘Making Movies.”
Andrew Morrison
October 2000
In the grand scheme of things, Japan's Susumu Yokota isn't just some new kid on the block, although his current level of popularity would lead you to believe he's electronic music's 'new young gun'. Far from it. Yokota's got all the groundwork behind him, still settling after over a decade In the trade. He's been quietly cutting albums - 22 of them
now - for labels like Sublime, and his own Skintone imprint, with stand-outs like '1998' and 'Sakura'. Yet It's been only in the past twelve months that Yokota has truly crossed over to a broader spectrum of acclaim. Despite the fact that he's cut nearly two dozen longplayers in his time, he only recently completed his first DJmix CD. In the past twelve months It's been Yokota's association with English record label and distributor Leaf that's lifted his profile so significantly, and opened a few more ears to the best-kept secret coming out of Japan. That label, which has released to Europe and elsewhere beyond Japan, Yokota's wonderful 'Image 1983-1998', 'Magic Thread', Last years acclaimed 'Sakura', and his exquisite new album 'Grinning Cat', seems a more than appropriate home for the sounds and the aesthetic of Susumu Yokota, what with labelmates like 310, Manitoba and Beige sitting alongside those releases in the racks. But aside from his more recent Leaf affiliations, there is certainly plenty of history -and music- to ponder when you consider Susumu Yokota.
"What would you say Is 'Susumu Yokota music', and how does this differ from other artists?"
"I have made ambient, dance music and various other styles of music, yet it's not about differences of technique; I make music with myself."
"You've worked with Japanese label Sublime in the past, but these days you're better known for your output through Leaf. What Is your relationship with them?,
"Skintone is my own Label, and I release works in Japan. Leaf have Licensed those works, so I'm in surroundings in which I can create freely."
"Your album '1998' was an Inspired fusion of beats, dub, jazz and funk. What are your feelings about that album now, some three years later, given the change in style you've implemented since?"
"I feel the sense and passion of the time. If I am requested to make the same album again, it's impossible."
"To my ears your style has become more minimal and assured In Its experimental nature since '1998'. How have you developed your sound, and what different equipment have you introduced over the years?"
"The things I am interested in and equipment have always changed. I get so bored if I've
not changed, so I always treasure my surroundings and try to have a fresh one."
"What is your opinion on sampling In modern music?"
"I take freely, no matter what kind of music - pop, classical, ethnic ... whatever may widen my sound."
"There are a lot of Japanese artists making some great music - Fantastic Plastic Machine, Co-fusion, Ken lshll, Fumlya Tanaka, Yamaoka, Silent Poets, DJ Shufflemaster, Takkyu lshlno and Magnet Toy are names I know of. What other Japanese artists do you think we should check out?"
"Yukihiro Fukutomi, Nobukazu Takemura, and Kyoto Jazz Massive."
"What Is It about Japanese culture that has Influenced so many Interesting electronic/experimental music producers, dating right back to the Yellow Magic Orchestra?"
"I don't know."
"Tell us 5 things we may not know about Susumu Yokota."
"1. I used to work as graphic designer. 2. I do the design for every one of my albums which I released through Leaf. 3. Before that, I released through PsyHarmonics in Australia. 4. I didn't receive my guaranteed fee. 5. I have released 22 albums."
"What Is your favorite food and alcoholic drink?"
"I like everything, but I especially Like noodles. And I like beer and sake."
"What are your plans for the rest of the year?"
"I will release my album 'Will', in the Fall through Skintone and Leaf, also I plan to release another album through Sublime later this year."
Numerous titles by Susumu Yokota, including his completely beautiful new album 'Grinning Cat', are available via Skintone(Japan), and Leaf/lnertla(Australla). Thus far, young Mark Rayner(ln-press) has called 'Grinning Cat' " .. an intimate sleepy-eyed electronic opus", and to us it is "simply as vivid as the heart of winter, and as inspiring as the lucid memories of childhood dreams and reflections. True and wonderful, 'Grinning cat' Is as perfect as ambience may come".
Andrez Bergen
2001
MULTIFORM JAPANESE TECH
You could never accuse Susumu Yokota of slacking off - one of the first Asian dance producers to gain attention in Europe and the UK via his Frankfurt/Tokyo tech-trance project for Sven Vath's Harthouse label during the early 90s, it seems like Yokota has hardly paused for a breather along the way. Dropping Motor Citystyle funk as Prism, weird breaks gear on Harthouse UK as well as his dancefloor friendly Ringo pseudonym on Reel Musiq, the Japanese producer has more recently put out disco house and ambient with three albums - 'Image 1983-1998', 'Magic Thread' and the forthcoming 'Sakura' work under his own name. Although the long players were originally released on his own Skintone stamp in Japan, they've been put out on Leaf in the UK, and make for Yokota's most captivating work to date.
Consisting of gentle, organic ambience, all three works are an alluring, introspective antidote to the frenetic pace of modern life. Given Yokota's surroundings - the ultra futurist surroundings of Tokyo - the soothing tones of the Skintone/Leaf album trilogy are all the more pertinent. "Each album has expressed one of my worlds," Yokota answers,
adding that "all I had to do was make the music to go with it.
'Sakura' means 'cherry blossoms' in Japanese, and all the track titles on 'Sakura' have a certain image, an atmosphere, I wouldn't say I'm a calm person, more of a well balanced person." Unsurprisingly, Yokota talks eagerly about working on soundtracks - "I find the synergy between a movie's plot and the accompanying sound very interesting" - and intends to mix sounds rather than beats on his first ever mix CD, scheduled for release on Leaf.
"I'm using tracks from various Leaf artists," he explains. "The label has been built up like a soundtrack anyway, so I won't be mixing bpms, which makes it easier for me to create a new world, It's different from my house DJing and production but both sides are part of my wor1d."
As always, Yokota's approach to his work is different, distinctive, like the innovations of his peers and fellow countrymen Yoshinori Sunahara and Ken Ishii. "We all make electronic music, but we're all different from one another," Yokota comments.
"At the same time, we all make music which is special, different from the norm, music which isn't 'straight'. Even though I don't speak English, I'm able to communicate with you because music transcends cultural frontiers and language barriers."
Richard Brophy
September 2000