YOKOTA
An enigmatic and compulsive producer, Yokota’s music grew from early sparse and emotive guitar sketches into groundbreaking, club-focused records, the overwhelming acclaim of which directed him towards complex experimentation and a pronounced rejection of formula.
Susumu Yokota is universally remembered as a charming, vibrant and thoughtful character, ambivalent to notions of success and recognition, who remained an innovative, inspirational force in electronic music throughout his life.
Although much of his youth was spent listening to his father’s Latin and Jazz records, it was the jagged new-wave sounds of local band The Plastics that really catalysed the 19-year-old Yokota. With their fusion of Glam Rock, Devo and early punk, The Plastics were typical of the western-led pop culture that was a dominant influence at this time. But while the Fussa neighbourhood was producing many home grown rock groups, Yokota’s late teens and early twenties were increasingly soundtracked by the imported post punk sounds of Durutti Column, Young Marble Giants and his abiding favourites, Joy Division. It was the stark, cavernous melancholy of post-industrial Manchester and Joy Division in particular that chimed most with the young Yokota. In a 1998 interview, he claimed that he ‘bought every release, including their Warsaw period. I listened to them every day. And I still listen’. Other dominant influences during this period included The Pop Group, Brian Eno, Talking Heads and the B52’s, prompting formative musical experiments in his bedroom with a simple multitrack recorder and guitar.
Yokota graduated from university with a degree in economics, simultaneously studying graphic design at art school. Following a period of travel in India, he focused on working as a designer, and by the early 90s had established his own successful practice in Tokyo’s Akasaka district, working with prestige clients on a range of projects from book covers to interiors. Alongside this commercial work he began to develop a personal style, based on a preoccupation with found objects and ready-made assemblages. His musical development continued in parallel, with multitrack experiments in his bedroom studio exploring juxtaposition and composition. He viewed his visual and audio works as complementary practices, and was still very much an art student at heart, open to new ideas and processes.
Having by now developed a more advanced analogue studio for recording his own music, Yokota also worked on a project combining visuals and sound for an installation. The resulting piece was an early video projection viewed with 3D glasses, released in three parts on VHS tapes under the name Tenshin. This was also the first music Yokota had made on a computer and as such, became the catalyst for a flurry of experimentation that initiated a step change in his creative focus.
At this time the electronica and dance scenes were accelerating towards a new era of innovation, and Japan’s nightlife was growing in tandem (2). Yokota found himself in the middle of this vibrant and evolving scene, embracing the multiple genres reaching him from the global dancefloor. Acid house had arrived in Europe adding a new impetus to the shifting landscape, while favoured influences like Psychic TV and New Order had also been dabbling with these fresh sounds. Yokota was now one of the Tokyo vanguard responding to squelchy sonics and the energy they inspired.
A revealing insight from this time comes from DJ Miku (3), recalling an early encounter with Yokota: ‘He came to the club with a Roland TB-303 synthesiser and headphones and I asked him what he was doing. He put the headphones on my head and I listened to these acid sounds he was making along with what the DJ was playing. He wasn’t even there to perform. I thought, ‘What a strange guy,’ but I became interested in him’. Subsequently the pair would often DJ together but Miku remained perplexed by Yokota’s idiosyncrasies as he drifted freely between genres, challenging the audience’s expectations and occasionally simply playing another DJ’s mix CD to ‘see how it sounded in the club’. Reflecting this time of musical expansion in Japan, 1991 also brought successful early homespun compilations including Ryuichi Sakamoto’s house-inflected Heartbeat and Hisa Ishioka’s La Ronde, the latter showcasing locals Manabu Nagayama, Toshihiko Mori and Sōichi Terada alongside New York front runners Pal Joey and Nick Jones.
That same year, Motte invited Yokota to play at Love Parade and his Interference festival. YouTube footage reveals a playful and irreverent set where he and friend Makoto (7) raise the roof armed with little more than a resonant crystal bowl, a Juno 60, a Roland R8 drum machine and the omnipresent TB-303. Ken Ishii (8) recalls how, despite his bare bones live set-up and usually ‘calm and shy’ disposition, ‘his wild stage presence would always drive the crowd into a frenzy’.
Toby Izui had also introduced Yokota to Manabu Yamazaki, aka DJ Yama, whose Sublime parties were mainstays of Tokyo’s techno underground. Yokota became a regular DJ at these events and when Sublime Records was subsequently born, he provided the label’s first release with abstract acid techno EP Akafuji. The expansive, airy Acid Mt. Fuji followed later that year, going on to inspire generations of leftfield techno architects.
In 1995 Yokota released two 12’s as 246 on DJ Yama’s Reel Musiq label. The numeric alias was a homage to the 313 Detroit area code and how heavily it featured in techno’s semantics and mythology. Route 246 is an important national highway running through Shibuya, and one that Yokota would often ride on his route downtown. His use of 246 was a reference to the way Japan was reshaping the prevailing American genres into their own identifiable style, as described and prescribed by the theories of Noi Sawaragi.
The growing commercialisation of techno in Japan was inevitable, and what was once a close-knit and self-sufficient scene had become a hugely popular cultural export. In response, Tokyo’s underground started to rally and shift again. Smaller more local nights and parties sprang up and Yokota was drawn to them, soon initiating the deep house party night Skintone with musical ally DJ Alex (9) at recently opened nightspot LUST in Tokyo’s Ebisu district. Skintone hosted a rotating cast of residents and associates including Yokota’s close friend Ayako Kataoka, one of the few female DJs in Tokyo at the time. Ayako remembers; ‘It was a safe space for our friends and us, and the party had a pure vibe’. Yokota designed flyers for the nights, incorporating imagery and ephemera he encountered on his walks around Tokyo’s winding streets. Kataoka continues: ‘He was always on his feet, finding little things like cats and flowers on the streets of Nakameguro and Aobadai where he was living back then’. These street relics often made their way into Yokota’s solo work, via track names and album artwork. Found sounds then began to take a more dominant role in his compositions, with organic samples forming an aural analogue to his visual experiments. Yokota was beginning to focus on the simple exposition of a few rich and hypnotic elements rather than the dancefloor maximalism of some of his earlier output.
This re-engagement with his surroundings - the quiet and residential backstreets of Tokyo - grounded him artistically, being a world away from the constant stroboscopic throb of the Tokyo club circuit. In a commemorative piece in Tokyo’s Ele-king magazine, journalist and founder Tsutomu Noda (10) recalls Yokota confiding that he was ‘so sick of the club scene and the clutches of the industry’ that he didn’t want to meet with people, preferring to ‘go to the park and chat with cats’. It was a time when he was living on the second floor of an old wooden house in Ikejiri-Ohashi, and there were no more 909s or 303s. He told Noda that he sold them because ‘he couldn't move on if he owned them’.
He would frequently allude to ‘kona’ or powder when asked about his working methods, suggesting that the sounds he was creating were granular: once scattered, never reassembled into their original form. This extended to his philosophy on life, frequently telling friends that he wished to become kona at the moment of death. Which might explain his compulsion to challenge himself, shrugging off the restrictions of genre and technology and training himself in new music-making processes. Scattering and remoulding grains of influence would go on to characterise Susumu Yokota’s work for the rest of his life.
Skintone shone a light on the diverse new directions in which his musical ‘kona’ had blown, from delicate, cyclical tape-loop meditations to neo-classical compositions. It also gave him the autonomy to combine his visual and music-making practices and importantly, to create at his own pace. The label was a great success and his experiments proved foundational in the global 00s ambient canon. Yokota’s close friends remember the early Skintone years as the happiest of his life; freely making work which channelled his early influences while treading new and revelatory musical terrain. Hideki Amano, founder of Music Mine, remembers how he “started yearning to produce a much more personal sound [derived from] image scenery or musical sketches instead”.
The first two Skintone releases, Magic Thread and Image 1994-98 represent Yokota’s first forays away from his previous commercial output. Partly drawn from original organ and guitar recordings of his early youth, these projects were a rejection of the synthesisers and sequencers that had been the bedrock of his earlier creative process. Both these early releases were initially produced as a very limited edition of 500 CDs.
Yokota’s first real triumph under the Skintone banner was the ephemeral, diffused ambience of Sakura (1999). Only the third release for the label, it was a pared-back album of bubbling ambient e-piano and hazy, opaque samplework that achieved tens of thousands of sales almost entirely by word of mouth. After signing a worldwide distribution deal with The Leaf Label (11), Sakura landed in the laps of experimental and electronic music royalty as diverse as Björk, Thom Yorke, Brian Eno and Philip Glass, all of whom became enduring fans of Yokota’s work. This album also became the first fully realised musical statement in a new, quieter chapter of Yokota’s life.
While his time spent networking with Tokyo’s music scene waned, his productivity certainly didn’t, and over the following ten years his ability to get by on making music alone allowed him to release a stream of unique, idiosyncratic albums on the Skintone imprint, each drawing on a similar bank of ideas and principles, but each employing radical new techniques.
By 2001, just after the release of his sixth album in the Skintone series, The Boy and the Tree, he had moved back into his parents’ Tachikawa townhouse. His mother had become quite ill and increasingly frail and this coincided with his own developing mental illness, which was becoming harder to ignore. The return home was a huge shift in environment for Yokota. Foregoing the noise and chaos of his expressway-straddling apartment in Ikejiri for a simple bedroom studio consisting of a computer, a small keyboard, a clutch of records and a small tape deck.
He corresponded briefly with a small group of artists from the Leaf Label and Lo Recordings, who provided vocal lines and instrumental ideas through the mail via the ubiquitous DAT tape. He spoke no English and his collaborators and UK labels spoke no Japanese, so communication was limited to thanks and appreciation rather than input or critique; not that any was required. Yokota wove the vocal elements into his own world of inspiration and his interpretations of paintings and films - Hayao Miyazaki’s (14) work in particular had rekindled his understanding of that experience. Yokota intuited that the link to spirituality could be reformed and presented in his work through this approach, glimpsed through the juxtaposition and combination of his disparate and complimentary musical elements.
In these later years, Yokota had revisited his passion for modifying motorbikes. He explained that he liked motorcycling because he could ‘feel life and death’, He had developed an interest in modified mopeds known as super scooters, Akira-esque choppers which could reach death-defying speeds of up to 200kph. Yokota had tweaked his custom build to lower the ride height to the limit, leaving minimal space between rider and road and increasing the potential for disaster. In an interview with Noda he joked that he felt like Sid Vicious as he zipped through the backstreets and opened up along the 246. Yokota’s life was now somehow characterised by this closeness to the precipice, seeking extremes of joy and fear.
He used all the energy he had to create music, continuing to produce an album each year almost without fail. Their stylistic fluctuation continued to surprise, while each work held an illusive, honest, and often arresting insight into his life. These albums captured Yokota’s spirit and character perfectly. In Noda’s words: ‘The sacred nature of dance music culture, the dark compulsion of Joy Division, and Yokota’s musical work were always fragmented internally. Yokota might not have suffered so much if he had identified with where he belonged, but that’s why he was so successful in portraying miraculous beauty’.
Susumu Yokota died on the 19th of March 2015 at the age of 54 after a long struggle with ill health. His sister Noriko, who remained by his side in his final hours, recalls the beautiful inflorescence of cherry blossoms that day.
Lo Recordings. 2025
with thanks to
Tsutomu Noda, Martyn Pepperell, Kensuke Hidaka, Ben Hodgson and Derek O’Sullivan.
Published in 1991, Simulation by the art critic Noi Sawaragi defined the development of Japanese pop culture as a process of destruction and reconstruction of western influences. His book critiqued the technique of sampling in depth, extolling its value as a contemporary art form. Sawaragi argued that sampling provided the tool for a repositioning of Japanese pop culture, as had already been affected by the advent of house music in the US. He further maintained that this process of reinterpretation was itself a signature aspect of Japanese pop.
The transition of the underground scene towards techno was fuelled by the significance of clubs such as Tokyo’s Bank, creating an environment into which venues like Cave and mega-club Gold would emerge at the beginning of the 1990s. It was here that parties aimed at fans of house and techno were established, leading to the opening of the soon-to-be-legendary Space Lab Yellow in 1992.
Conceived by promoter Daizo Murata, Space Lab Yellow (a name chosen to overtly reclaim the western slur) accommodated three dance floors and was meticulously curated to mix genres across its schedule. Yokota regularly attended with DJ Toby, Makoto and Manabu Yamazaki.
DJ Miku would go on to release Yokota’s Stevia and Anima Mundi projects on his Newstage label in 1996. These were arguably the first signs of Yokota’s transition towards more ‘poetic electronica’, as described by journalist Tsutomu Noda.
Tenshin, which has the dual meaning ‘heaven’ or ‘transformation’, was Yokota’s first artist name. Then came his acid mononym Ebi (which translates as ‘shrimp’) on German imprint Space Teddy. This was followed by the first two album releases under his real name: The Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection’ for Harthouse (Germany) and Acid Mount Fuji’ on Sublime (Japan).
After this came a string of aliases; Yin and Yang for Frogman Records (Japan), Ringo and Prism, also signed to Sublime (Japan), 246 on Sublime sub-label Reel Musiq (run by DJ Yama), Mantaray for the US label Silent, and Anima Mundi and Stevia on Newstage. A 1996 abstract ambient album came out under his Bamboo Data guise. Yokota also released under his own name for the majority of these labels - Harthouse and Sublime in the early years, but also for imprints Exceptional (UK) Play (Japan) and United Sounds of Blue, a Frogman sub-label.
Much to the amusement of DJ Toby and his contemporaries, Yokota’s Ebi project was named after a semi-hallucinatory imagining of a shrimp as a drum machine, a detailed legend of which can be seen on the insert for his second offering, Zen, on Space Teddy. The image sees the curve of the tail as the bass drum, the tip as the clap, the head as the snare, antennae as cymbals and the legs as rolling 16th beat hi-hats. Yokota later explained that “The most visible form (attributed to techno) was Ebi. Rhythms were transformed as Ebi jumping up and down. This experience of visualising sound led me to create electronic music”.
The coastal resorts in Goa had been a pilgrimage site for European hippies since the late 60s. By the early 1990s the developing trance scene had become integral to the region. Several of the DJs who visited Goa began to extend their tours to take in Tokyo clubs, which were relatively cost effective to reach from India.
Enigmatic friend Makoto was a fellow designer and a significant influence on Yokota during his early years after art school. Makoto was an art director for the legendary Kyoto-based underground psychedelic band Les Rallizes Dénudés. He was renowned for his wild dance freakouts that often accompanied Yokota’s early onstage performances. An avid fan of French decadent literature, his room was lined with books by Baudelaire and Villiers de L'Isle-Adam.
The two friends shared the same taste in music, and Makoto played an important part in Yokota’s early productions, collaborating on the first Tenshin project and early Ebi releases. Long after, when Yokota supported Underground Resistance at their first Tokyo show in 2006, Makoto was again to join him on stage.
Ken Ishii’s Garden On The Palm on R&S Recordings (Belgium) followed hot on the heels of Yokota’s Harthouse debut. Ishii’s management company Music Mine approached Yokota offering to represent him alongside Ishii. Though their styles were different, as fellow pioneers of Japanese techno they were often viewed as a pair, being interviewed and photographed together and touring as Sublime label mates.
Yokota had met local Paris-born DJ Alex Prat (aka Alex From Tokyo) at the Sublime office in Shibuya in 1995. Yokota was preparing to release his sprawling new album Metronome Melody, the first under alias Prism, and Alex was enthralled by the pensive and refined garage house sounds he was hearing. Yokota was also interested in the burgeoning house scene in France and the two would share music recommendations and impassioned late-night conversations, amassing an arsenal of material they would play out on the weekends when they landed on the same bill.
Tsutomu Noda was to become a good friend of Yokota’s, having interviewed him on many occasions and visited his various studios and apartments regularly. Whenever Yokota finished an album he would always contact Noda for a debrief.
Tony Morley of The Leaf Label was introduced to Yokota’s work by Andrew ‘Plug’ Lazonby, then running Leaf’s Japanese distribution company. Morley was captivated by Yokota’s Skintone output, in particular Image 1983 - 1998, the collection of eerie, otherworldly recordings which was the second album on Skintone in Japan. It subsequently became the first Yokota release on Leaf in September 1999 (including for the first time in vinyl format), followed six months later by Magic Thread.
By the time Sakura came out in Japan, international interest in Yokota’s ambient works was developing and Leaf hit the ground running with a corresponding release in September 2000, the label’s third Yokota release in just under a year. ‘Yokota was producing music at a phenomenal rate,’ says Morley. ‘As well as the Skintone albums he was producing house and techno for other labels - he was putting out three or four albums a year in this period. But Sakura was the one that really hit in the west. The reaction to it was immediate and long-lasting. We were selling hundreds of copies a month for years after it was released. It still sounds phenomenal. It has a timeless quality that I think comes from the fact that there’s something slightly unsettling about it. That doesn’t exist in a lot of the ambient music released at the time.’
Sakura is still the label’s biggest selling album, and scarce original vinyl copies fetch eye-watering sums online. Leaf continued to release the Skintone albums Grinning Cat, The Boy and the Tree and a limited edition vinyl only release of Will, positioning Yokota as a leading artist in a renewed ambient genre.
The relationship continued until they parted ways at the time of the proposed Symbol album. The album was a significant departure from previous releases and represented a huge legal challenge given the number of both classical and contemporary samples that needed to be cleared. Lo Recordings stepped in and in 2005 Symbol was released. The album became one of the most successful for Yokota. Lo then went on to put out the second half of the Skintone recordings, by this point restricted to CD only.
Although eclipsed by the acclaim for his music, Yokota’s visual practise never stopped developing. The release of Sakura coincided with a solo show of work at a prestigious Aoyama gallery. The exhibition included his object works, photographic works, visual works and paintings. Many of the artworks were reproduced for Skintone releases, among them sleeve art for Mix and Image 1983 - 1998 and the artwork for Sakura.
The evocative, cinematic slant of Yokota’s music doubtless led to director Alejandro González Iñárritu commissioning him to write the soundtrack for his 2006 film Babel, starring Brad Pitt. Yokota could not accept the commission due to his declining health, however he joined Ryuichi Sakamoto in contributing the piece Gekkoh.
The albums The Boy and the Tree and Laputa were a direct response to Hayao Miyazaki's anime. These films, an overt celebration of ancient spirituality and nature, were a reminder of Yokota’s earlier visit to the island of Yakushima, home of Jomon Sugi, the ancient tree at the heart of an untouched ravine. The search for a route back to such spirituality was also part of Noi Saragawa’s enquiry into a solution to Japanese cultural dissonance.