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.

A1: 1000 Wing Beats Per Second
A2:My Energy
A3:Capital Of Daisy
A4:Siva Dance

B1:Pegasus 150
B2:Don’t Go Sleep
B3:Merrygoround

C1:Robed Heart
C2:Strma A Uska
C3:Eternity Is The Beginning OF The End
C4:L'Etranger

D1:Rainbow Dust
D2:Your Shining Darkness
D3:Holy Ground

Including an essay by Gavin O’Shea in the liner notes...

... “Your intitial realisation is that waltz time is dreamtime. Why didnt we think of that before. And not the dreams of midsummer but the real ones of the over-slept afternoon. The complex and vivid, the troubled and slippery. As the tracks proceed the mastery of this device audibly gallops off in all directions. Out of the Susumu sunshine on the Yokota plain, once again guests in his landscape.”....

Wonder Waltz is a carnival. With a previously unseen playfulness, Yokota ventures into a dance of multi-genre trickery. The sprawl is across trip hop, twitchy house, synth pop, darkwave, early 90s-style ambient techno and shoegaze-adjacent chanson, all under the umbrella of 3/4 time. It is carousel cyclical, a whirling emulsification of the ancient and new. Primarily an embrace of a genre previously obscure to Yokota - the voice and rhythm of central European folk - it was originally pitched to Lo Recordings as a demo of ‘a dance album in waltz time’, naturally flummoxing the label staff. He cracked the constricted forms of the era’s four-to-the-floor tyranny wide open, transgressing and transcending. Conceived in its current form, Wonder Waltz carved a niche as the revolving centre of Yokota’s playground; gleefully scattered and irreverent.

The rhythmic metre is tied together by unique and idiosyncratic vocal contributions from an array of guest vocalists: Rothko and Distant AWOL’s Caroline Ross, Shibuya-kei starlet Kahimi Karie, Czech avant-garde violinist and singer Iva Bittová, and even close friend Alex Prat (AKA Alex from Tokyo), who recorded his vocal for the Camus-inspired L’etranger on a hand-held recorder one afternoon in Yokota’s parents Tachikawa townhouse. Yokota roves and extracts, and here the ramble becomes a frolicking skip.

The essence is the twin concepts of waltz time and vocal collaboration, a free experimentation with genre and instrumentation. As in ‘Merrygoround’, the early fairground organ waltz is aptly applied in an unexpected, dizzying spiral. Yokota is cheekily toying with listeners expectations, hinting at his previous immersion in Tokyo’s techno scene on the mardy, carnatic-leaning tech-house stomper ‘Siva Dance’, but managing to eschew all reasonable expectation. Yokota retains license to pair whatever he pleases, and spins circles that completely stun.

In lieu of the rococo plod of classical waltzes, Yokota dropped a wildly oscillating series of three beats-per-bar vignettes, from the avian woodwind flurries and buoyant breaks of ‘1000 Wing Beats per Second’ to the subterranean gamelan steppas of ‘Strma a Uzka’ via the boulevard trotting synth reveries of ‘Don’t Go To Sleep’ featuring Karie’s wide-panned, tingle inducing vocals. Other highlights include the Liaisons Dangereuses-coded darkwave heater ‘L’etranger’, replete with nihilistic french mutterings from Alex, and the unflinchingly weird, early 90s-style ambient synth science of ‘Rainbow Dust’, which also inexplicably features fragments of a violin hoedown. In each rotation Yokota remembers mirth.

Before you’ve really got your bearings, the last strains of the typically pensive, chiming closer ‘Holy Ground’ ring out, and the intoxicating ride is over. The wonder of the album is its carefree ecstasy, a provocation of anything preordained. Yokota’s mastery, here and throughout the Skintone series, is in creating enchanting mosaics from known components. Any one part of his disparate influences or concepts might seem enough on its own, but Yokota’s stylistic chaos is a refusal to accept the surface level. This whirlwind is testament to his status as a hyperprolific analyst still possessing distinctive whimsy.