Susumu Yokota

Skintone Edition

Volume 1

Magic Thread - Volume 1 - Album 1

Yokota's startling debut release on the Skintone label is full of mystery and wonder. It mixes his love of deep house beats, eclectic ambience, and sampladelic oddity.

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Image 1983 - 1998 - Volume 1 - Album 2

Mesmerising album of Yokota’s earliest sonic explorations that demonstrates his unique vision and sublime transcendence of boundaries.

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Sakura - Volume 1 - Album 3

Yokota's ambient masterpiece that set the world alight with it's dazzling and immersive transcendent beauty.

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Grinning Cat - Volume 1 - Album 4

One of Yokota's most loved releases that explores the intersection of jazz, new age ambience and a world of found sound and samples.

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Will - Volume 1 - Album 5

Yokota's most upbeat and playful release on the Skintone label. A wild melange of bumping beats, freestyle samples and esoteric goodness.

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The Boy And The Tree - Volume 1 - Album 6

Yokota at his most enigmatic and profound. A deeply psychedelic voyage into a world of ritual and magic.

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Laputa - Volume 1 - Album 7

The mystical world of Laputa is perhaps Yokota's most challenging work but immeasurably rewarding. Beguiling and bewitching in equal measure.

Skintone

IIn the late 1990s Susumu Yokota became increasingly sensitive to the changing environment of the Tokyo dance music scene. As the underground continued to grow he found himself playing to larger audiences, drawn away from the more comfortable intimacy of earlier experiences. Despite domestic acclaim, the expectation to continue within the confines of genre was starting to prove problematic to him.

Yokota was something of a polymath; trained as an economist, working as a graphic designer, established as a musician. His influences were wide and varied. Never entirely at ease with being considered solely a house music producer, his approach to creating was always an experimental one.

He often cited Sawaragi Noi as a key influence. Sawaragi had defined the development of Japanese pop culture as a process of ‘destruction and reconstruction’ of western influences, and it was this concept that inspired Yokota throughout his career. Developing a channel for his creative endeavours was therefore a natural and necessary step for him, and Skintone was to become the umbrella under which he could explore and expand.

Volume 2

Symbol - Volume 2 - Album 1

Regarded by Yokota as his masterpiece and rightly so. An endlessly inventive mixture of classical and contemporary forms.

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Distant Sounds Of Summer - Volume 2 - Album 2

Without doubt one of Yokota's most beautiful and easily accessible productions. Haunting, majestic and timeless.

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Wonder Waltz - Volume 2 - Album 3

Yokota at his most adventurous and sprawling and enchanting featuring an array of guest vocalists. A treasure chest of musical marvels.

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Love Or Die - Volume 2 - Album 4

An overlooked classic in the Yokota canon with elements of shoegaze, blissed out lo-fi electronica and smudged new age fantasy.

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Mother - Volume 2 - Album 5

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

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Kaleidoscope - Volume 2 - Album 6

The longest album in the Yokota catalogue and arguably the deepest. Endlessly inventive and wondrous. Yokota at the height of his powers.

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Dreamer - Volume 2 - Album 7

An album that covers all Yokota's favourite bases from deep immersive ambience to rolling breaks, deep house and sampladelic experimentalism.

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The Leaf Label and Lo Recordings.

Leaf and Lo were both formed in 1995. Their respective founders Tony Morley and Jon Tye collaborated and exchanged music regularly, operating as they did from parallel emerging musical platforms. The two also came together to run the experimental Scratch Club night in Spitalfields, East London, along with Rob Young from The Wire. Tony Morley discovered Susumu Yokota’s work and instantly recognized him as an important new voice. Leaf re-released ‘Image 1993-1998’ a year after the Japanese release and continued to put out the Skintone albums to great acclaim, positioning Yokota as a leading artist in the blossoming ambient scene. This relationship continued until they parted ways prior to ‘Symbol’. Yokota had previously worked with Lo Recordings, having collaborated with Rothko on the ‘Waters Edge’ EP in 2002, and was a fan of the label. When The Leaf Label opted not to take on ‘Symbol’, Yokota approached Lo. Lo Recordings began the arduous task of clearing samples for the album and the following year ‘Symbol’ was released. The album became one of Yokota’s most successful, forging a relationship that saw Lo Recordings putting out all subsequent Skintone albums.

Design

The Skintone reissue project has been designed by the partnership of Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn under their creative moniker Non Format. The designers have worked closely with Lo Recordings for thirty years. Although the pair now head up the Nordic design team ANTI they still find time to nurture the portfolio they have generated through Lo’s roster.

For the Skintone project Non Format have gently abstracted Yokota’s original designs and placed them full square and central to the reworked sleeves. Nine new fonts have also been struck to combine and contrast across the fourteen albums.

Audio Mastering

Mark Beazley has remastered the entire Skintone collection. A founder member of Rothko, whose debut albums were released on Lo Recordings, Mark was an early fan of Yokota’s debut ambient work ‘Magic Thread’.

Lo and Leaf were jointly curating The Scratch Club in Spitalfields at this time and a collaboration between Rothko and Susumu Yokota was suggested. The resultant EP, ‘Waters Edge’ ,became Yokota’s first release on Lo Recordings. The project led to a full length collaborative album, ‘Distant Sounds of Summer’ which was released through Lo in 2005.

In Mark’s words: “It has been a real honour to revisit and master all of Yokota’s work over the last months. To concentrate on his sound world in such detail was a revelation. The breadth of his emotional landscape is tangible throughout his music. At times leading to some dark places and then back out into the light. He was a great artist, I am so very proud to have worked with him.”

Ringo