Symbol

Volume 2 - Album 1

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

A1: Long Long Silk Bridge
A2: Purple Rose Minuet
A3: Traveler In Wonderland
A4: Song Of The Sleeping Forest
A5: The Plateau Which The Zephyr Of Flora Occupies
A6: Fairy Dance Of Twinkle And Shadow

B1: Flaming Love And Destiny
B2: The Dying Black Swan.
B3: Blue Sky And Yellow Sunflower
B4: Capriccio And The Innovative Composer.
B5: I Close The Door Upon Myself
B6: Symbol Of Life, Love, And Aesthetics.
B5: Music From The Lake Surface

Including an essay by Tsutomu Noda in the liner notes....

... “During the production of the album he explained that he listened mostly to Moodymann’s Black Mahogany and Silence in the Secret Garden albums. In his studio he knitted together Detroit’s soulful music with fragments of classical music, whilst looking at a collection of radical late 19th centuary anti-modernist european art”...

Symbol is an act of reassembly and recontextualisation. From its cover, a cropped segment of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and The Nymphs, age-old emblems are cast in fresh lights suggesting new shadows. The painting is traditionally a representation of seduction and sexuality, which Yokota strips of its context by cropping out its beguiling protagonist Hylas, leaving the Nymphs with no discernible object of affection, an enigmatic gaze to unknown fruit. The same is true of Yokota’s sampling choices, sprung from their cannon in Western Classical but reimagined wholly. His looped segments from Debussy, Vivaldi and Saint Saëns create delightfully unexpected metric cycles, stripped now of their overarching themes and reassembled to expose their delicate architecture, intricately entwining then falling away in spectral fragments. Symbol is the harvest of obsessive mechanics, spliced motifs over rolling organic rhythmic beds, applying the source material in its rawest possible form to ensure that every melodic exposition is bold and meaningful.

This beautiful symbiosis is a profound realisation of Yokota’s search for the sublime. Subtle dreamscapes composed of recognisable lush frequencies in new textures. Yokota had moved to a bare-bones studio in his parents Tachikawa house by 2004, trading the constant drone of Tokyo expressway traffic for the enveloping quiet of the suburbs. Composed in a ‘modest, wooden-walled tatami room without even basic soundproofing’, the picture of Yokota’s sound is quite the opposite, verdant foliage and sunlight escaping through the fronds. By this point in his work, Yokota consigned his internal quest to that of some fundamental beauty, perpetually out of reach and beyond aesthetics. The mode of search is his reorganisation, the reanimation of radical anti-modernist European art from dust to fresh ascensions. He eschews darkness, threatening old wraths but glimpsing the light, organising gardens into surreal patterns.

It opens with the suspended, oneiric wash of ‘Long Long Silk Bridge’, before the first strains of Debussy’s Clair de Lune preface a dense tapestry of orchestral polyphony, wafting South Asian vocal lines and music-box synths on ‘Purple Rose Minuet’. The aptly named ‘Traveller in The Wonderland’ leads the listener down rambling arteries in the undergrowth, with spiralling fragments of Saint Saëns’ Aquarium and Bacchanale arranged in effortlessly psychedelic free association. As the wormhole deepens, Yokota steers us through a dream sequence of gilded vignettes, from the achingly poignant ‘The Plateau Which The Zephyr of Flora Occupies’, on which concert hall chord stabs call to mind Messiaen's sparse parallelisms and Theo Parrish’s house piano abstractions in equal measure, to the bawdy, detuned chug of ‘Capriccio and the Innovative Composer’, which juxtaposes concert piano frills and an insistent, buzzing mediaeval pipe refrain. Other highlights include the buoyant, technicolour striations of ‘Symbol of Life, Love and Aesthetics’, and the arrestingly beautiful closer ‘Music From The Lake Surface’, on which spidering rhodes figures give way to a shimmering beds of strings and breathy vocals.

Interested in the art of sampling adopted from house music and armed with inspiration from Moodymann records Black Mahogani and Silence in the Secret Garden, Yokota sought to conceive of a new place, a beauty achieved through symbolism. He rejected the overt sentimentality of romanticism whilst embracing his preoccupation with angels, spirits and the soul. Whilst the classic source material was burrowed in proscribed aesthetic beauties, Yokota gives their melodic fragments a transgressive abundance. His celestial textures are a cosmic manifestation, placing Symbol in an ephemeral location. The adoption of elements rather than wholes is an assembly, an elusive reanimation of many distinct points. The resulting sound is wonderful and wondrous, quite beyond recreation.