SAKURA
“Yokota turns our attention once more to the intangible shadows of sound where fragile melodies are more hinted at then executed, where memory becomes an instrument and where technology leaks colour and light as well as sound”
Paul Sullivan
Third unmissable instalment in gripping Japanese ambient trilogy.
It takes a while to work out what makes Yokota's ambient works- alternating with his more straightforward house and 'techno releases on the Sublime label - such a captivating proposition. The temptation to sit back and let them wash through your bones like a healing spell of early summer sunshine is initially too strong to resist, but once you emerge from the reverie induced by electronic instruments, with harps for innards and drum patterns lovingly constructed from bits of the Young Marble Giants' old skin, it's the sheer physical and intellectual energy that stays with you. Whether mercilessly propulsive (the vital, piano-driven Naminate) or exquisitely thoughtful (Hisen reinvents Massive Attack's Protection as an Oriental gardening anthem), Yokota's mood music always hits its target.
Ben Thompson
October 2000
Susumu Yokota is reputedly best known in Japan for blending House, Techno and jazz together, but over here his more Ambient material is better recognised than his dancefloor efforts. Sakura follows his earlier albums Magic Thread and Image 1983-1998 in this vaguely contemplative vein, and it's very much a quiet stormer of a record.
At first hearing, Sakura just drifted past -it seemed boring, vapid, thoroughly cliched, an absolutely innocuous take on Trance reverie with nothing in any way distinguished or interesting. Second time around, it sounded truly amazing, a perfectly poised amalgam of easygoing chill out and laidback warmth.
There's certainly nothing in any way thought-provoking to Sakura, but its appeal is more than just superficial. Yokota is an adroit and meticulous musician, treading a careful line between austerity and melodrama. The music never sounds forced, it's always laidback and entirely natural, and it unfolds with agreeable, gentle grace. Rhythms ripple and reverberate, sounds shimmer and surround; it's like a bath in sunset luminescence. A track like "Naminote" shows that it is not the result of too much time with a few New Age LPs, a drum machine and a digital delay unit. And, with its fragmentary female vocals and stranded drumbeat, "Kodomotachi" evidences a great ear for space and positioning
Brian Duguid
October 2000
STRAIGHT NO CHASER
You'd have to call this music ambient I suppose, but only because no― one's thought up a term for ambient music that you’re supposed to actually listen to. To slip into PhD mode for a moment: whereas a lot of ambient music is emotionally very general, being designed to make a mood in a room, the tracks on Sakura are as specific as, say, on a Terry Collier album. There's reflective, wistful, optimistic and downright joyful music here. It's wordless and it's not for dancing to (apart from the gorgeous Genshi), and the programming is second to none. Actually the programming is awesome. You think the production's layered and lush only to realise there's actually nothing going on at all. Susumu Yokota’s made a wonderfully subtle album of gorgeous moments constructed from the very simplest of elements. Furthermore, I defy anyone not to buy this after a glance at the lovely minimalist packaging
Jonah Colon
October 2000
Such was the ambient quality of Sakura, Susumu Yokota's third album of last year, that it earned comparison with classics by Brian Eno, Aphex Twin and Global Communication. But
Yokota paints with an even broader palette on this mind-boggling mix of work by himself and fellow Leaf label artists. With more than 25 tracks it takes. in hints of future jazz from the Sons of Silence and slivers of Oskar's gorgeously elegiac Air Conditioning. A glittering and emotive insight into the most engagingly experimental label around.
Ed Potton ****
February 2001
WHEN 'Sakura' first falls into your lap, intact and fully formed, it’s so exquisite you're almost afraid to touch it in case it breaks. Drifting openers' Saku' and 'Tobiume' reveal Brian Eno's ambient efforts as those of a ham-fisted glam rocker, 'Namiote' is everything you hoped for from St Germain's recent 'Tourist' opus but never received, and the whole is imbued with the kind of gentle, soulful warmth you'd find., the best of Terry Callier. The third, in Yokota's series of albums on Leaf (licensed from his own Skintone label), 'Sakura' touches on various genres - deephouse, techno (he's also recorded for Harthouse and Sublime), jaz and even (yikes) 'modern classical' -but deftly kneads them into a unique, organic entity that renders reference points redundant. Yokota is probably far too polite to say so, but 'Sakura'’s message is clear: listen up, mortals, and learn some fucking humility.
Tom Mugridge
October 2000
Japanese techno producer turned ambient wizard completes his “trilogy” on Leaf. Following on from his inimitable Images and the wonderfully indefinable Magic Thread, Yokota turns our attention once more to the intangible shadows of sound where fragile melodies are more hinted at then executed, where memory becomes an instrument and where technology leaks colour and light as aweel as sound. Even on the few occasions when the tempo gets raised. Yokota still manages to make the finest soul-soothing music out there. Incredible.
Paul Sullivan
August/September 2000
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS
There's another way of capturing the spirit of this extraordinary country, however. Susumu Yokota's new album, 'Sakura', is named after the cherry blossom that briefly floods Japan every spring. As the trees come into flower from the south of the islands, and spread up to the country's northernmost point, the blossom's progress is tracked intently; a national phenomenon, a sign of transience that epitomises Japanese culture's close - but often ignored - relationship with nature and the seasons. "There used to be a road lined with sakura trees close to my home," says Yokota. "I grew up seeing those beautiful cherry blossoms every single spring day."
Actually, Yokota doesn't say anything to us. Interviewing him involves a tortuous process of faxing and translation which only emphasises his detachment from frenetic modernity; he doesn't even have an e-mail account. All this adds to the magical, dislocated quality of his music.
There's another way of capturing the spirit of this extraordinary country, however. Susumu Yokota's new album, 'Sakura', is named after the cherry blossom that briefly floods Japan every spring. As the trees come into flower from the south of the islands, and spread up to the country's northernmost point, the blossom's progress is tracked intently; a national phenomenon, a sign of transience that epitomises Japanese culture's close - but often ignored - relationship with nature and the seasons. "There used to be a road lined with sakura trees close to my home," says Yokota. "I grew up seeing those beautiful cherry blossoms every single spring day."
Actually, Yokota doesn't say anything to us. Interviewing him involves a tortuous process of faxing and translation which only emphasises his detachment from frenetic modernity; he doesn't even have an e-mail account. All this adds to the magical, dislocated quality of his music.
While Yokota initially became known outside Japan for lush house releases (the latest of which, Zero, is out on Sublime), it's his excursions into uneasy ambience for the Leaf label that are most satisfying. The best way to listen to his records, he advises, is, "in the very quiet place and eyes are closed". Which makes sense.
Image 1983-1998 (drawing links between early acoustic experiments and contemporary machine atmospherics), Magic Thread (a gentle concept piece about weaving, obviously) and Sakura are albums both evocative and unworldly, bringing to mind memories and senses while simultaneously being nebulous, unanchored.
Image 1983-1998 (drawing links between early acoustic experiments and contemporary machine atmospherics), Magic Thread (a gentle concept piece about weaving, obviously) and Sakura are albums both evocative and unworldly, bringing to mind memories and senses while simultaneously being nebulous, unanchored.
"I just use some machines and my way of working is very simple," Yokota claims. "I believe my life and background are far more important than the production. I make music to convey my world for people." When he was young, watching the cherry blossoms, he wanted to be a baseball player like most other Japanese boys.
Instead, Yokota became a musician, working at furiously productive speed but often creating spiritual music, and a photographer and designer with dreams of making a film.
On Sakura, the influence of jazz is just discernible (he mentions pianist Chick Corea, transcribed by his translator as Click Corea). But the only person he feels a special affinity with, perversely, is Vincent Gallo. A shared sense of outsider chic, perhaps. Certainly, Yokota may have vague similarities with Arovane and Vladislav Delay, but there's a frailty (like those sakura blossoms), an ethereal quality, a sense of melody refracted from another world, that sets him apart. I cannot explain it in words It is very difficult for me” he says and really, you know exactly what he means.
John Mulvey
September 2000
Rune Hellestad
2000
It sounds much as you would expect from a man who traded in a career as an economist for a life as a conceptual artist: clean lines, purity of thought, careful transparency. It sounds like “a serene exercise in making sense of the world, taking time to watch the patterns fall and think about the meaning of x. It sounds, mainly, and it is beautiful.
Yet while Japan's Susumu Yokota might use his music to create a luminous sense of space and light, bright and stark as a white screen door, `Sakura' is never merely an aid to ambient wellbeing, a little purification ritual to clear away the clutter of the day. lntelligence, subtlety, insinuation- these are the elements that Yokota prizes most highly, and as he shifts effortlessly between the opaque calm of Tobiume and the static seep of Gekkoh, the pizzicato fear of Shinsen or the Labradford siren―song of Azukiiro No Kaori those pristine outlines slowly begin to blur. As aware of Brian Eno, Tortoise and Richie Hawtin as Joy Division and Young Marble Giants, this multi-dimensional mood music, the sound of a minimalist installation sprung uncannily to life, Pretentious? Ahhh 8/10
Victoria Segal
September 2000
Better known for his more mainstream, techno recordings, Susumu Yokota has over the past year or two developed a nice line in trance/ambient tonal pieces, most winningly on last year's lovely Magic Thread album. Sakura is in effect an extension of the same style, featuring exercises in audio balin such as the opening track, "Saku", an aural sunrise picked out in Eno-esque keyboard tints against an ambient backdrop pregnant with cavernous reverb, a presence in itself. Unfolding unhurriedly from echoing loops of harp or piano, Yokota's designs are minimal without being minimalist, even when built from what appears to be a loop of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians,' as on "Gekkoh" the effect is soothing, but not as hypnotic as one might imagine. "Naminote" is the most active piece here, but barely so, its looped jazz piano figure glistening with expectant vibraphone tones before a discreet drum track enters, effecting subtle transformation through a slightly accented offbeat. "Uchu Tanjyo" is more typical, in the way it blends gently shuffling percussion, 'ripples of water, heavily reverbed smudges of keyboard tones and a few mumbled (Japanese) phrases into something that hovers on the edge of formality without slipping into the demonstrative. Cool, calm and collected, Sakura is the most well-chilled album of the year.
Andy Gill
September 2000
You know those scenes in films where someone has, say, been involved in a car crash, and on the way back to consciousness they drop in on a place where everyone is wearing white and has a soothing voice, and someone has fogged up the camera?
Bend your ear and this is playing in the background. After a series of projects in techno and dance under a camouflage of different names, Susumu Yokota continues to develop his ambient side. Ambient music all too often sidesteps any musical thought (such as how to start or end a piece) in favour of formless and anaesthetising journeys through rainforests. But these tracks, windows on a series of musical atmospheres that stretch forever, still contain tension and release in their harmony. The rhythms, even at such slow speeds, are designed to work off each other, rather than just phase in and out in the hope of fortuitous interest. The instrumentation chimes with carefully echoed electronic pianos and synthesised bells, guitars and harps rather than drowning washes of sustained chords. And, as an overall shape, it rises to a beating centre that reminds you of Yokota's jazz and house interests, so the recording never flatlines. Sakura floats and provokes, but the intricate view
is never obscured by fluffy clouds.
Pascal Wise
September 2000
Yokota has a somewhat multifarious musical output. In his homeland Japan,
he's best known as a prolific producer of· deep house and off-kilter techno, but over
here it's his output of ambient music that has caught the most attention. Sakura is part of the latter, a 50-minute long, gently undulating electronic soundscape that you can easily become lost in. The emphasis is on textures rather than tunes, only a few of the tracks have any beats (the ones that do don't go much,above 70bpm) and the melodies are so simple and repetitive you stop consciously noticing them after a while. They're still working away though, altering your mood in sometimes relaxing, sometimes a little unnerving ways.
Laurence Phelan
September 2000
SUSUMU YOKOTA is one of the few musicians who has succeeded in developing Brian Eno’s original ambient music prototype: music in which not much appears to happen, but which can
both enhance your environment as background music and reward your attention when you turn it up. Yokota's music is not as “unlocked" as Eno's - it's built on more regular repetition but he combines these repeated figures with less rigid elements that gives his work a vital balance of structure and fluidity that most ambient wannabes never master. Sakura is the third in a series of Yokota's ambient albums released on Leaf and it is the most enjoyable. In fact, it is pretty much flawless, apart from the cover - the kind of kitschy picture you might find on the wall in a hotel you wish you'd never checked into.
Mark Edwards
October 2000
In the 1990’s ambient music sounded torn between two extremes: light New Age rubbish and “chilled” compositions that were little more than Mogadon dance with the volume turned low. Very few artists captured the warmth, intrigue or intellect of the 1970’s and 1980’s stalwarts Brian Eno, Harold Budd and Jon Hassell, With Sakura, Japanese DJ Susumu Yokota has clearly grabbed the baton, fusing gorgeous, beguiling ambience with the subtlest hint of the techno for which he is renowned. This is the kick ambient music needs: a one-step cure for work stress and club fatigue.
Stephen McKenzie
January 2001
Why should one person′s minimalist ambient loops seem like wisdom embodied in sound while another′s just sound like the aimless noodlings of someone who bought a load of gear and doesn't know what to do with it? Beats me. But maybe the person to ask Japanese house and techno DJ/producer Susumu Yokota, whose recent introspective releases have surely made him the most interesting fish in electronic music’s stillest pond.
Sakura takes up where the wonderful Magic Thread left off, weaving figures of amoeba like simplicity into 50 minutes of music that seeps into your bones, creating the same nameless, but powerfully emotional effect as its predecessor. Yokota′s techno leanings peep out on a couple of tracks― Genshi and Naminote – But overall, Sakura owes more to 20th Century classical minimalism than the post-Motown sound of Detroit, and bears comparison with Eno′s finest '70s recordings.
Zen Mastery 9/10
Simon Ounsworth
October 2000
He's Japanese, y'know. No, really! Anyway, Susumu is also something of a god-like genius of the ivories. And stuff. His rare skill is the ability to mix sky-scraping Jazz dynamics to icily cool quasi-classical ambience and then (occasionally) paste the whole lot over
some startlingly swinging beats. Naminote flows like a juicy great river through-your skull, irrigating as it moves, while Azukiiro No Kaori is content to let the voices collide and perform odd little dances between your ears. If you worry about the lack of clipped harps and rueful, amnesiac sound paintings in your life then, frankly, you've got too much time on your hands. Use some of it to get
outside and buy this
Rob Fitzpatrick
September 2000
Just when you thought Susumu Yokota's excursions into organic ambience couldn't get much better, he comes up with this, which is, frankly, a stunningly beautiful record. With 'Sakura', effectively the third and final part of a trio of ambient works, Yokota enigmatically marries the irreverent acoustic dream weaving of the previous two albums, 'Magic Thread' and 'Images 1983-1998', with the explorative electronic rhythms of his earlier work on Harthouse and Sublime. Hence we get the soothing, subtle techno of 'Genshi', with the gossamer like threads of acoustic melody on 'Hagoromo', and the Penguin Cafe inspired strings of 'Hisen' move effortlessly through to the delicate swing time jau of 'Naminote'. Susumu Yokota continues to show himself as one of the most gifted producers on the planet, and, not before time, the early works of Eno and Aphex Twin have been joined on their pedestal. You never know, 'Sakura' may even make ambient music fashionable again. SN • 10
Steve Nicholls
September 2000
"I'm a house DJ, yet I've always turned my eyes on avant and new music. So I'm not a house DJ who is very conservative." If there's a word to sum up Japanese DJ/ambient sound sculptor Susumu Yokota, it's progression. Since mapping out experimental music some 15 years ago, Yokota has never stood still. It's why this genial gentleman has been an economist, an artist and, of course, a DJ. It's also why his discography reads like an A-Z of dance music genres, releasing anything from Germanic techtrance for Svan Vath's Harthouse label, through to breakbeat lunacy and Detroit-style funk. Yet right now it's his seamlessly beautiful, utterly beguiling ambient clickscapes that Yokota is most praised for. Last year's 'Image 1983-1998' compilation and last February's hypnotically serene 'Magic Threads' put most electronica to shame.
Why? Because Yokota's delicate yet arresting intricacies offer genuine emotional refuge. Being functional or repetitive doesn't come into it.
"Yes, I don't do this for putting my music into a certain category," he says. "I do this for expressing my emotions and I think each listener can find and feel things in my music."
Nevertheless Yokota has already become restless with ambience. His new album, Sakura, is the third and final instalment of his introspection-through-avant smart trilogy - indeed his next release after 'Sakura', 'Zero' will see him exploring dancefloor-oriented pastures again.
So like everything else he's done, Yokota has become 'bored' with ambient. On 'Sakura', he's already going forward, drip feeding subtle deep house and even vocal lines into his familiar blip-bop patterns. What hasn't changed is his commitment to creating evocative music from empty space and microscopic details. It firmly nails Yokota as a master craftsman to rival Brian Eno. Surprisingly, though, Yokota's having none of it.
"I feel there're limits to my technical skills of programming and sampling. I want to come closer and closer to fresh things, which I really seek now."
It's called progression.
Neil Davenport
October 2000
One of my favorite musicians returns with yet more new material, and this is serious stuff. Musically rich and, production wise, totally lush this album shows there’s more to ambient work than a few Eno samples, a dolphin call and a poem. Balmy tones and layers of gentle music come at you in waves whilst Yokota, ever the master, squeezes every last drop of soul from his music. For me one of the albums of the year.
Ben Wilcox
October 2000
This album marks the third in Yokota series of celebrated ambient outings, following on from the acclaimed Magic Thread and equally well praised Image 1983-1998. His ability to create blissfully enchanting music has often been compared to that of Brian Eno, and that standard is certainly maintained on this latest offering. Cyclical sounds rise and fall into each track, with every addition evolving into a new aural sensory treat. He’s also not afraid to let things build until a kick drum drives the rhythm where it feels right.
Mostly though things are kept supremely ambient and serenely simple. Fantastic sounds to immerse yourself in completely, then just drift away.
Tom Kihl
September 2000
Will the real Susumu Yokota please stand up? Hot on the heels of two other very recently released albums, here are two more from the prolific, and talented Susumu Yokota. On the one hand we have the fragrant, delicate Sakura album, a series of fascinating pieces soaked in . idiosyncrasies - particularly the masterfully original remake of Soft Cell's Bedsit/and (Kodomotach .On the other is the pulsing, rhythmic dance music tour de
force Zero, which is stuffed full with gloriously rich electronic house-grooves. It i takes major talent to produce such differing but equally intoxicating music - what on earth will his next few albums (scheduled for next week, no doubt) be like?
Tom Magic Feet
September 2000
The third quiet album from a man best known until recently for quirky house and breaks. He’s heard here as an inscrutable master of the aural haiku, but any Eastern attitude in this music reflects the concerns of his influences. Sakura - cherry blossom - is also a brand of pastel crayons, which seems appropriate. You get a dozen pieces, simply made from organic sounds - electric piano through delays, off-balance loops of guitar, violin and harp, not much beat. There’s a lot of reverb – it’s dub in reverse: he floats extra sounds above a track or seeps them into its crannies. It sounds beautiful. Think Cluster and Eno, early 90s ambient, Steve Reich; repetitive music that sounds hand-made and human. DJ10-4
Andi Chapple
October 2000
Japanese genius Susumu Yokota delivers another beguilingly beautiful project previously released on his own Skintone Imprint When you understand the title means 'cherry blossom’ In the producer's native tongue.It.ls easy to get some sense of the tone of his effortlessly organic double pack. From the drifting opening strains of Saku to the shimmering deephouse of Genshi and the celestial ambience of Tobiume, Yokota's somnabulant sounds slip effortlessly between the realms of profound introspection and insidiously rhythmic exploration as exhibited on the piano driven jazz of Naminote. Gorgeous and essential
Dave Stelfox
September 2000
After Ken lshi, Yokota was the next Japanese artist to have his work released in Europe. His prolific output fluctuates between deep house orientated grooves and soothing summer ambience, and this explores the latter. Leaving behind the insistent drone of the city, he switches to the softer, water coloured tones of nature holding back with the beats and letting the melodies carry everything along. His recent 'Fancy Flavour' track on the latest instalment of Leaf's 'Invisible Soundtracks' series is a good reference point as this is steeped in the same beguiling sentiment. Starting with a bleached skeleton of melodies he gradually adds flesh to the bones over the 50 minutes running time and there is a real sense of progression here. However, whilst the music of many artists is seasoned with tongue in cheek self-mockery, this piece is universally heartfelt and on the odd track like 'Kodomotachi' can' sounds almost too sincere. Perhaps I'm just a cynic and cringe too easily.
TC• 7.5
Tony Cooper
September 2000
Akiko Ono
2000
This is a delirious cocktail for head-trippers. Skintone label boss Susumu Yokota succeeds by exploiting an overactive imagination, whether it's
Native Americans riding Ry Cooder-style slide guitar, cascading music boxes, molten harps, drifting chamber quartets or swing-driven jazz
bands. Eminently tasteful and ambitious, the golden opener alone blends Miles Davis' 'In A Silent Way', Brian Eno's 'Music For Airports' and Phillip Glass. Rejecting cheap ambience in favour of a rich reverie, Yakota's dreamscapes will melt the staunchest cynic, his crystalline melodies,
sonic smudges and beguiling blurs breathtaking vindications of the border-crossing process. Although renowned for his dancefloor circuitry
on Sublime, this master of flow motion has proved that minimalism plus melody can equal levitational momentum. Sure, there are moments when
his distant horizons fade just too far into the background, but overall this is an exotic return to form(lessness) for the Japanese magus after the
somewhat stale 'Magic Thread'.
Kevin Martin
October 2000
Japanese producer enters rarefied ambient realms. Throughout the '90s, Susumu Yokota has excelled at techno, house and drum & bass. But like many veteran dance artists, he eventually yearned to create more contemplative music. Yokota has done this exceptionally well on a triology of works that began with 1998's Magic Thread, continued with 2000's Image 1983-1998 and now concludes with Sakυra. On this 12-track CD, Yokota weaves delicate webs of cyclical melodies and moist dronescapes that tantalize the sense, while narrowly averting new-age drippiness. It’s a thin rope Yokota treads, but never falters. When rhythms do emerge, the music's essential placid beauty still remains. At its best (“Saku,"“ Shinsen,"“ Kodomotachi"), Sakura holds its own with Brian Eno's On Land and Apollo as an ambient benchmark.
Dave Segal
February 2001
In the grand tradition of Japanese minimalism, Yokota's supremely ambient sound odysseys beguile and delight, moving ever-so-slowly towards their gentle climaxes with gorgeous
precision. Hard to believe he also makes banging techno!
September 2000
He's not your average techno type, Susumu Yokota. He rejects commonplace images of Japanese technology, and has instead withdrawn into a more traditional vision. This album therefore, is named after the country's cherry blossom, and you know, it's really very nice low-key electronica indeed.
October 2000
Phantasmal electronic with warmth and depth. Worshiped at home as one of Japan's biggest house/techno DJs, Yokota's reputation in the UK and Europe is based around his reflective ambient releases,
such as Image 1983-1998 and Magic Thread. Sakura, with its exquisite spiralling threads of sound weaving a gently stained ambient canvas will only serve to enhance that reputation.
Paul Johnson
October 2000
‘A spliff and a sofa – proper chill-out music.’
Nick Warren
November 2000
Akiko Ono
2000
The follow-up to last year's similarly diaphanous Image 1983-1998 album, Sakura sees the "Japanese Eno" at the peak of hispowers. As with Eno's classic ambient fare, Yokota deals in shifting, luminescent sound fields and makes a virtue of repetition. Whether it be the slowly revolving Fender Rhodes figures of Saku, the murmuring vocal samples and odd percussion of Uchu Tanjyo, or the jazzy pianos of Naminote, the pattern rarely alters: a quietly evolving cloud of choice musical colours that seduce by stealth rather than by grand gesture. Here and there the cool tones are broken up by chattering drum machines (Hisen) or "underwater" bell tones (Kotomotachi). An exquisitely chilled delight.****
David Sheppard
December 2000
One of Japan's best-known DJs, Yokota was one of the first producers to have his music released outside his native country. These days he is building a reputation for a more reflective thread in his music. Sakura is the third in a series of evocative albums with a heritage in house, techno and jazz. Not so much ambient as ethereal, Sakura's shimmering washes of sound and subtle textures bring Zen into the 21st century
Hari Kunzru
October 2000
SUSUMU YOKOTA’s Skintone label is designed to facilitate musical projects with an introspective feel rather than dancefloor bent he is perhaps better known for (Yokota is one of Japan's biggest house/techno DJs) It’s these releases, 'Magic Thread' and ‘Image 1983‐ 1998', that Leaf has brought to a wider audience and enjoyed enormous critical acclaim for in the UK and Europe `Sakura' is the third album of this reflective creative thread, bringing in subtle elements of deep house and vocal lines to culminate this intial trio of beguiling ambient works.
2000
The term 'ambient' is generally enough to make me shudder, implying a cod-Ibizan mixture of saccharine, 'easy-access'
melodies with a few cinematic samples chucked in for good measure
Thankfully, Susumu Yokota's third album of ambient music hails from the opposite spectrum, following a tradition that aims as much to make the listener think as well as to soothe The first thing that you notice about his music is it's intense, intangible quality - enigmatic melodies that evoke a sense of melancholy, stillness and tension
Incorporating vocal snatches and mute tribal elements, the music seems to evoke snatches of one's long-forgotten past. Deeply meditative and lending itself to introspection, it's a beguiling piece
Alberto
September 2000
Before the early days of house, and all it offered a, young Susumu Yokota, the productive Japanese artist responsible for weaving unique curiosities of innocence and playful spirit. Recently Yokota has been returning to these mid eighties days and with each visit he forages gently through ever greater depths of a maturing cerebral ambience. Progressing on from Image 1983‐ 1998 and Magic Thread, the medicinal qualities of Sakura are a sophisticated solution to the world weary less in touch with the inner child, to which previous efforts have appealed.
It's dream(life) like qualities ebb therapeutically through subtle melodies that work to freshen, perhaps even cleanse a person of clinging monotony or fatigue.
Around the incomprehensible yet beautiful vocal loops of Azukiiro No Kaori and Kodomotachi writhe smooth wisps of rhythm that lead through the surprise shimmering jazz of Naminote,
Should you immerse yourself in Yokota’s Sakura the most menial of things can be as glorious as a fine wine, free from impurities or a Sunday afternoon spent reading your paper cover to cover or an evening concluding with love or the prospect there of.
Andrew Morrison
September 2000