“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 eastern district. “Just by blowing the powder, it will fall apart, and it will never return to its original shape.”
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, 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 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 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 — seeking the calm within.
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 303s and 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” and the other “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. Strums and strings shimmer in a dusky atmosphere of longing, nearing nirvana, setting the tone for Sakura’s psychic adventures to come.
‘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 aging…” 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, and even wonder — pure electric Tokyo 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 ever flickering.
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 and 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