Missed Mondays - Susumu Yokota’s My Energy EP
We're starting off a new era of Missed Mondays with a more ambitious piece. This one is dedicated to an artist I only discovered through his own death, Susumu Yokota. He passed away at the age of 54, March 27, 2015 after going through prolonged medical procedures. Though he did not play many live shows outside his home country, his music was able to reach outside of Japan mostly through the efforts of Harthouse, a German label and The Leaf Label in the UK. Some of his best selling albums, Sakura and Grinning Cat, helped to put Leaf on the map and before that his success on Harthouse in the House music scene was truly far reaching. His popularity was due to his fiercely independent yet insightful gazes into his own music- his own soul. Today I want to look at the dual label release, My Energy EP. Put together by the aforementioned Leaf Label as well as Lo Recordings, My Energy EP consists of 6 tracks spanning all the way back to 1998 and all pulled from various releases.
The first track is "Love Bird" from the album, Grinning Cat, released on Leaf in the UK and Skintone, Yokota's own label, in Japan. At this point, 2001, Yokota had moved away from Dance music and was exploring a more ambient space. More specifically, he had moved away from downtown Tokyo to a home in the suburbs, giving him a larger studio and bringing with him his girlfriend and three cats. Now I don't claim to know what it is about Japanese men and cats, but it seems that the same creature that inspired one of my all time favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, also happened to inspire another Japanese artist. The similarities between the two don't end there; with a track titled "Love Bird" and a book entitled The Windup Bird Chronicles, coupled with a strong jazz influence, I don't doubt that I'll fall in love with this musician as quickly as I fell down the rabbit hole of the worlds Murakami's dazzling and entrancing books. The album itself is very piano centric and you can feel his earnest curiosity in this song as he cut up piano loops that he may have taken from samples or played himself and arranges them in different ways. A simple beat keeps the focus on the wandering melody and leaves the floor of the track to the lower register slurs. On top of all that a lush almost vocal sounding pad keeps it all ethereal and ambient, very much like the highly praised, Sakura. Released on the same labels as Grinning Cat, Sakura won acclaim as the best electronic music release of 2000 by The Wire, though it was released a year earlier in Japan. The track taken from that album for this EP, "Kodomotachi," means children in Japanese. The song uses a sample from Jodi Mitchell's "Songs to Aging Children Come," combined with synths with a lot of reverberation and create a hauntingly large space. At this point in the album, Yokota has transitioned away from acoustic instrumentation and the only thing you might hear is a small guitar line in the background. The repetitiveness of the song is hypnotic and more strongly enforced by the fact that the looped sample is vocal.
Fast-forward ten years and we arrive at Mother. The first album on the EP that was released on Lo Records, it follows the same vibe as the rest of his catalogue from the 2000s. This album in particular had a lot of guests on it and for the track they used in this EP, "Meltwater," we have Caroline Ross, who first worked with him on 2005's Distant Sounds of Summer, as well as Kaori, who was most active in her solo career during the mid-2000s. This song starts off a lot more melodic than the first two. Not only are the vocals more straight forward as opposed to being chopped up samples, but the bells have a more linear melody as well; one that is reinforced by the key change less than a minute in. Even the guitar, though used sparsely, gives melodic direction to the song. Roughly half way through, the huge reverberation of the bells give way to pads with slightly less melodic direction, but coupled with a sparse drum kit, give the song a more meandering rhythm. The only time the vocals wane, the guitar comes in to lead the listener out, showing a lot more intentional structure than Yokota showed in earlier ambient works. Of course the next track, "Your Twinkling Eyes," moves back to a less structured, purely sampled ambiance. This, despite being on Kaleidoscope- the next album released under his full name. A lush and bright guitar part is looped, cutting off in a strange place, with metronome sounds, mallet strikes, strange bows and vocals spread throughout to further put off any sense of sustainable time keeping. It's a great comparison piece to "Meltwater" in that he uses the same instrumentation he's so fond of, guitar and keys, but in this case they are used not in a melodic fashion, but rather in a more harmonic and rhythmic way. Band-aid ripping sounds, spacial pads, brake screeches and something that sounds like water going down a drain all add character to a song that may otherwise be hard to remember. The brake screeching was so real that I looked up from my seat on the bench outside the train station expecting to see an accident.
One of my favorite tracks on the album, recorded back in 1997 (one of my favorite years) is "Morino Gakudan." It starts off with clear, dramatic and tense melodic intention. Switching up the more traditional use of the two instruments, Yokota has the piano create the tension while using strings to lighten things up a bit. Swirling synths come in periodically to remind us that we're moving forward and give something else to mull over. A steady clip clop also sneaks its way into the back along with a more industrial rhythmic element. This song falls apart in a classic way, via the removal of elements bar by bar leaving the listener in the same place it picked them up.
The final song is, "My Energy," from the 1996 album, Wonder Waltz. This album is smack dab in the middle of everything else we've heard on this EP thus far. At this point it seems that Yokota is experimenting because this album has almost no common theme to unify it. We hear Yokota using female voices again, but this time most of the tracks on this album are sung by Kahimi Karie. Despite being the title track of the EP, it doesn't feel like his piece as Karie really controls it. The toy piano and regular piano provide a backdrop and melodic rhythm while hand-drums, another Yokota favorite, give more traditional rhythm. It's calm and fairly straight forward, except for maybe the rhythm, which, living up to the name of the album it's from, is in 3/4. It can be hard to pin that down with the vocals and rhythm throwing off your internal metronome. All in all, a strange choice to close the EP and stranger still to make the EP title.
My two favorite tracks on the album are easily, "Kodomotachi" and "Morino Gakudan." Despite the latter not having any vocal melodies, the mood set by the pianos shows just how much Yokota can do with one loop and the strings show his dynamic and emotional range. You can hear the tinkering and challenge in his use of the strings as a way to accompany the piano in building tension, but then releases it. In the former, using vocals to add atmosphere and keeping things paddy and spaced, Yokota creates quite the relaxing home listening environment. Yokota can herd you into a space in your head or he can put a feeling in your bones that makes you want to dance. This album is a lot more of the home-listening/atmosphere-creating kind of music and it's a great example of the different times in his life during that part of his career. I highly recommend using this EP as a way to figure out which releases you want to listen to more of and working your way through his discography that way. His career is one that can be educational to follow as you see how his style changes and watch where he gets his inspiration from.
