SAKURA

Volume 1 - Album 3

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

A1. Saku
A2. Uchu Tanjyo
A3. Hagoromo

B1. Genshi
B2. Gekkoh
B3. Kirakiraboshi

C1. Kodomotachi.
C2. Hisen
C3. Tobiume

D1. Naminote
D2. Shinsen
D3. Azukiiro no Kaori

Including an essay by Martyn Peperrel in the liner notes....

......“If you look or listen close enough, you’ll recognise the same splendour and harmony Yokota-san was reaching for everywhere. Year after year, the cherry blossoms continue to bloom and fall, making way for new leaves and foreshadowing the warm summer months ahead. Similarly, twenty three years after it was first released, Sakura continues to offer listeners a way to understand the inevitability of decay within a never-ending stream of change. It’s a bittersweet beauty, one emotionally heightened by the poignant sadness that all things must one day end.”......

Without doubt the most loved and lauded entry in Susumu Yokota’s catalogue, Sakura dropped on the Skintone label in 1999, before it debuted on the UK’s Leaf Label for European distribution in 2000, by which time it was already a huge success, going on to sell tens of thousands of copies through word of mouth alone. Sakura was the first fully realised statement of intent for Yokota’s recently christened Skintone label, a forum for sounds inspired by the loose, improvisatory atmosphere at his club nights of the same name in Tokyo’s Club LUST. Sandwiched between two propulsive techno and house outings on Sublime Records, Sakura follows on from Image 1983-1998 and Magic Thread, carving out a crystalline channel of blissful ambience flowing alongside Yokota’s more club-centric output. In a 2002 interview with Bim Ricketson, Yokota said that “It feels natural for me to do both dance and ambient, it’s a balance that exists within me.” and it is this flexibility and functional non-duality which gives Sakura much of its ephemeral intrigue and beauty.

Over the course of its 12 tracks, Sakura unravels like cascades of petals falling from the eponymous cherry blossom trees. In the opener ‘Saku’, a blinkered guitar and e-piano motif stutters in endless cycles, fading in and out either end of the track as if mimicking the relentless reset of the seasons.

‘Tobiume’ revolves around surging currents of warm clav and glacial house pianos, ricocheting out over the rolling loop beds. ‘Uchu Tanjyo’ steps out into more humid, crepuscular terrain with its clattering hand percussion, snatches of ebullient spoken phrases and distant, breathy flutes landing us firmly in a similar microclimate to Jon Hassell’s fourth world heat-haze. ‘Hagoromo’ brings us back to the swaying reveries of the first two tracks, with undulating, contrapuntal harp figures eventually elapsing into Riley-esque rhodes canons, before standout track ‘Genshi’ juxtaposes Yokota’s familiar humming e-piano coils with a plosive 909 kick and oneiric bells, channelling his washier, more dub techno-adjacent efforts, as well as Tangerine Dream’s pointillist synth meditations and Steve Reich’s proto-rik minimalism.

‘Hisen’ is another curveball, built on the foundation of an intensely phased trip hop groove, with saccharine violin arpeggios and plaintive rhodes harmonisations, while ‘Azukiiro No Kaori’, perhaps the most arrestingly beautiful track on the album, revolves around an axis of cavernous, resonant - you guessed it - e-piano, with snatches of mellifluous vocal riding the thermals.

The desolate, far-off city sparkle of ‘Kodomotachi’ sounds eerily like a prequel to Burial’s classic ‘In McDonalds’, while ‘Naminote’ revolves around a splashy, driving Chick Corea sample, evoking the entropic scrambles of Shibuya’s namesake crossing, before the soporific ‘Shinsen’ and glistening melodic arcs of ‘Kirakiraboshi’ evoke the last of the falling Sakura blossoms.

In 2006, Alejandro González Iñárritu of The Revenant fame approached Yokota to produce the soundtrack for his 2006 psychological drama Babel. Although Yokota could not accept this commission because of his deteriorating health, the centrepiece from Sakura, ‘Gekkoh’ was included in the soundtrack. Yokota had long harboured ambitions to compose for film, telling Ricketson that he would “like to work with Jean Pierre Jeunet and Vinsent Giaro and if it’s possible, to work with an old director, Parajanov”. Perhaps it is the seething undercurrents of emotion in Yokota’s work which gives it its cinematic quality- he had expressed an intention to “express ki-do-ai-raku (the four emotions; joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness) through music”, and throughout Sakura, the affect fluctuates between profound tranquillity, hesitation, melancholy, and joy with ease, addressing the fickle nature of human emotion, while transcending the inclination to label moods entirely.