Susumu Yokota - 'Sakura'
No. 27 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums from the 1990s
“In the future, I want to become powder,” the music maestro Susumu Yokota told journalist Tsutomo Noda in 1997, the two sitting in an old wooden house in Tokyo’s western district. “Just by blowing the powder, it will fall apart, and it will never return to its original shape.” Or like a sakura flower in the breeze, or like music — blow away.
So indeed he did. Born in 1960, Yokota was in his thirties when rave culture came to Japan, or more accurately, when he and a small cadre of DJs and other artists helped bring its sound to the island nation — its own “second Summer of Love” — and gave it a quality and shape all its own. Prolific in the extreme, Yokota produced some 30 albums in his lifetime, ranging in styles, from techno and house, to ambient and breakbeat, including forms like trip hop, tribal tech, acid jazz and drum ‘n’ bass.
Yokota first landed on the global map with his trance and acid techno debut The Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection, on German label Harthouse in 1993. Along with his second album, Acid Mt. Fuji, on the Japanese label Sublime Records, he very quickly became a fixture in the European electronic music scene, playing at Berlin’s Tresor and the Love Parade in 1994, the first Japanese artist to play the legendary street festival. That same year he released the spiritual acid masterpiece, Zen, as Ebi, the Japanese word for shrimp. True to both names, it floated and drifted like a cloud of crustaceans and plankton traveling under the night sea in moonlight; two years later, he would release Ten, another masterwork of pure acid bliss for Berlin label Space Teddy.
The dreamy optimism of the 1990s was in the air and the bloodstream, zipping through wires and motherboards and circuits, over telecom lines, interconnecting a new world order — or disorder, if one were paying close enough attention to the wild sounds of the underground. Yokota brought his own crazed genius and romantic sensitivity to the whirlwind, best heard on his Ebi excursions, his TB-303 lines a swirling ecstasy of outward and inward gazes, flowing in fractal waves of pure wonderment and profound contemplation — searching for a deep calm within.
“I’m trying to achieve that beautiful thing,” he told the journalist Bim Ricketson. “There is always fear, rage, and ugliness existing behind beauty. I have been trying to express ki-do-ai-raku (the four emotions: joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness) through music. I would like to express even one’s hidden emotion with reality. It’s my eternal goal.” His missionary zeal for the emotional and the beautiful came in part from an early love of Joy Division and Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants, who only put out one album in 1980, Colossal Youth, whose stripped down instrumentation and organic, almost church-like hush-ness, based around vocalist Alison Statton’s intimate yet wispy singing style, evoked Japanese enka music, and touched Yokota deeply.
“The Young Marble Giants have affected me the most of all musically,” he revealed to Ben Thompson in 2000. “I can feel deja vu from them.” When one listens to Statton’s voice and their minimal aesthetic, almost Zen in its approach, one can imagine how it provoked a new kind of connection between Yokota and the music coming out of the West. They fit a mood he obviously was after, the fleetingness of the falling Japanese cherry blossom, the impermanence of life, and how our emotions are like the winds, billowing and whispering to us from the past. Perhaps in the kobushi, enka music’s traditional trembling singing style, and Statton, he heard the deja vu of the planet.
Yokota was part of the Shōwa era generation of Japanese who grew up in the aftermath of World War II, a time when Japan would ascend out of the ashes of its militaristic folly, two cities decimated by nuclear bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the economic miracle that would follow from the ‘50s to the ‘90s. In that time, Japan’s craft in technology and art would spread around the world: Sony, Panasonic, Toyota, Konami, Capcom, Nintendo, Kurosawa, Ozu, Sakamoto, Murakami. But enka music remained a more native obsession, the quivering, wavering singing of its famous “Queen of Enka,” Hibari Misora, expressing both the quiet beating of the heart contrasting with the torrents of the sea. In such music, was both the calm and melodrama of nature and humanity, and in post punk, Yokota heard it echoing.
For hIs love of such nature only grew. For someone who once said his “life became techno” in the ‘80s and early ’90s, he described how in the late ‘90s he began to take regular mountain walks, re-absorbing nature’s calming effect. “The smell of grass and trees, the air in the woods makes my mind clear, and it gives good effects for making music,” he explained. “Walking among the big trees, I can hear my heartbeat and the echoes of the earth.” His music reflected his deep devotion to the landscape and to nature’s ever-shifting beauty. Like the great Japanese painter, Hokusai, who also devoted much of his thought to Mt. Fuji and nature, Yokota’s life became nature.*
In 1998 alone, he released five albums, a feverish outpouring of artistic urgency, as if he could see his own future in his dispatches to the void. As Ringo and Ebi, he had mastered the acid waves, but the end of the ‘90s would see Yokota take on a deep personal mission to find peace amid the tempest to come. Living an ascetic life in Tokyo’s nestled corridors of the ancient and the cybernetic, he weaved organic sounds and samples into his intense gaze, unfazed by the fame that was slowly growing around him, setting aside his Roland TB-303s and TR drum machines.
Decamping to Ikejiri-Ohashi, adjacent to bustling Shibuya, Yokota embarked on a multiyear project that synthesized his own music label vision — Skintone — with his own artwork and music, culminating in a suite of ambient albums, including Grinning Cat and Laputa. But 1999’s Sakura was the one that would capture the imagination of the world’s elite electronica community. Named after the fleeting pink flower blooms of Japan’s cherry blossom trees, the sakura, it indeed embodied the joy and sadness of life, the hope and worry of the techno age, and the inner quiet we would lose.
‘Tobiume’ and ‘Genshi’ are the obvious standouts, effortless melodic grooves with gently flecking guitars and sweet glimmers of electricity. One means “flying plum,” while the other means “atom,” together expressing the infinite magic of nature, from the edible to the invisible. Starter ‘Saku’ — “block” — gently dissolves into the air like leaves falling onto the surface of a lapping lake — its strums and strings shimmer in a dusky atmosphere of longing, nearing nirvana, setting the tone for Sakura’s psychic adventures to come, the path of the hanafubuki — a blizzard of cherry blossoms.
‘Uchu Tanjyo’ — “space station“ — takes Yokota’s imaginings into zero gravity, yet awash in a tribal cadence, rocking the soul ever so softly across deserts and voids. ‘Hagoromo’ and ‘Gekkoh’ — “feather robe” and “gecko” — hover in moodier waves, more conflicted, more askance, a bigger splash far far away sending us afterlives of reflection, tinged with the warps and grains of disturbance. Awakened to greater mysteries, ‘Hisen’ — “share” — moves into a closer circle, its snare drum brush launching plumes of sparks into the sky, its effusive keys lifting the mind, while ‘Azukiiro No Kaori’ — “red bean scent” — brings the warm comforts of home.
Daylight shining in, Yokota draws these streams of emotion back to childhood and then forward in ‘Kodomotachi’ — “children” — looping a voice sample that seems to be saying, “come to aging — change — children come, come to changing…” over a sweet swinging dance of tugging boat sways and cresting tips of airborne surprise, a deeper undulating scatter of notes running miles back to shore and out into the great wide open again. ‘Naminote’ — “wave hand” — struts the sidewalk with a jazzier accord, vamping with drum snaps, piano unrest, up to no good, but also up to, it turns out, wonder — filled with the aura of electric Tokyo bullet trains and neon streets.**
So we come to the end. ‘Shinsen’ — “fresh” — echoes Harold Budd’s ambient masterpiece Pavilion of Dreams in a humid Japanese summer night, a tip of the hat to a maestro far from techno, yet ever so slightly touched by the waves of digital to aural convergence, a meeting of spirits over the dissolution of space and even time. Then a “shining star” — ‘Kirakiraboshi’ — sparkles high above, reverberating deep down into the soul, whimsical yet sobering, as we hear what sounds like someone saying “Yokota,” repeating, in a dream, out of a dream, his star flickering then gone.
Upon its 2000 release in the UK, The Wire’s Brian Duguid was amazed at just how Yokota’s greatest album snuck up on him. He admitted he was bored on first listen, but something drew him back. On the second listen, its quieter charms warmed him down. “Yokota is an adroit and meticulous musician, treading a careful line between austerity and melodrama,” he wrote with yet still a little reservation about Sakura. “The music never sounds forced, it’s always laidback and entirely natural, and it unfolds with agreeable, gentle grace.” The Wire later voted it their top album of the year.
“I only met Yokota three times,” Leaf label owner Tom Morley reflected many years later, “twice in the UK and a third time when I visited Japan in 2001. Yokota drove me (sometimes at alarming speed) through the endless sprawl of Tokyo and Yokohama to the tranquil city of Kamakura, where we visited ancient Buddhist and Shinto shrines... Later we visited an onsen (hot spring baths), a real Japanese treat. Though he spoke very little English, he was always a charming and thoughtful companion.”***
Sadly, in 2014, Yokota-san died at 54 after a long illness. His death shocked the electronic music world: following the upsets of 9/11, wars, economic meltdowns, political uprisings, and technological upheavals, our lives blown from their original shapes, never to return. Sakura. Sakura. Even so, from atoms to plums, robes to geckos, children to stars, we can hear him still, his masterpiece flowing through, changing us like powder from the breath — drifting, awakening, forever.
Tracks:
1. Saku
2. Tobiume
3. Uchu Tanjyo
4. Hagoromo
5. Genshi
6. Gekko
7. Hisen
8. Azukiiro No Kaori
9. Kodomotachi
10. Naminote
11. Shinsen
12. Kirakiraboshi
*Katsushika Hokusai, better known as just Hokusai, is Japan’s most famous painter, beloved in Japan and a major influence around the world. He lived from 1760 to 1849, and is best known for his vividly colored woodblock prints series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. The cover of Yokota’s Acid Mt. Fuji actually uses the Mt. Fuji from Hokusai’s “Fine Wind, Clear Morning,” also known as Red Fuji.
**The vocal lyrics sample in ‘Kodomotachi’ is actually Joni Mitchell, taken from the song ‘Songs to Aging Children Come.’ The lyrics that Yokota takes and transmutes come from the lines: “Songs, to aging children come / (Songs, to aging children come) / Aging children, I am one (I am one).”
To me, the way he cuts, re-edits, and then loop syncs his edits, evokes “changing” as well as “aging.” Most likely by coincidence or possibly by design, the arrangement of the Mitchell lyrics and their timbral and temporal warping, also evoke Young Marble Giants’ song, ‘Constantly Changing,’ which has the lyrics, “Constantly changing / Never the same as, never remaining.”
***Morley shared this memory after news of Yokota’s death. He became Leaf’s most famous and influential artist and Sakura is still perhaps I believe the label’s best-selling and most impactful album.