Susumu Yokota World Listening Tour

Join us Thursday, February 19 for the Susumu Yokota World Listening Tour stopping at Head Hi.

Hosted by Head HiFi music director and record collector M:sco Disco, we're thrilled to be part of these 60 intimate listening sessions spanning 6 continents organized by Lo Recordings from London (UK)  as part of the Head HiFi series. The remastered and reissued album includes 2 blue 12" vinyl records and posters with Yokota's artworks and graphics, a set that any music lover and record collector must have.

We'll feature the album Sakura, Yokota's ambient masterpiece, originally released in 1999, featuring 12 wonderful subtly percussive textured melodies that we'll listen through our legendary vintage Klipsch La Scala sound system. Susumu Yokota’s lasting influence and impact on electronic and contemporary music is difficult to overstate. With the generous assistance of the Yokota family, Lo Recordings made a special release to commemorate the singular talent of this music pioneer.

More about the artist:

Susumu Yokota (1961 – 2015) was a uniquely gifted artist and a true creative pioneer. His prolific recorded legacy encompasses an extensive series of pivotal 12” releases and over 30 albums, each defined by a distinct musical and emotional signature. 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.

Yokota’s evolution followed a mercurial course, taking cues from 70s minimalism and avant-garde, the Kankyō Ongaku of 80s Japan, British post-punk and new wave, pre-millennial ambient, Detroit machine music, New York disco and garage, European electronica, neo-classical aestheticism and multiple diverse strands of sonic abstraction. His later works are characterised by a reflective, exploratory finesse that echoes Yokota’s internal quest, culminating in a sequence of immersive and ambiguous albums that continue to reward attentive listening. 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.

More about the album:

Without doubt the most loved and lauded entry in Susumu Yokota’s catalogue, Sakura dropped on the Skintone label in 1999, before it debuted on the UK’s Leaf Label for European distribution in 2000, by which time it was already a huge success, going on to sell tens of thousands of copies through word of mouth alone. Sakura was the first fully realised statement of intent for Yokota’s recently christened Skintone label, a forum for sounds inspired by the loose, improvisatory atmosphere at his club nights of the same name in Tokyo’s Club LUST. Sandwiched between two propulsive techno and house outings on Sublime Records, Sakura follows on from Image 1983-1998 and Magic Thread, carving out a crystalline channel of blissful ambience flowing alongside Yokota’s more club-centric output. In a 2002 interview with Bim Ricketson, Yokota said that “It feels natural for me to do both dance and ambient, it’s a balance that exists within me.” and it is this flexibility and functional non-duality which gives Sakura much of its ephemeral intrigue and beauty.

Over the course of its 12 tracks, Sakura unravels like cascades of petals falling from the eponymous cherry blossom trees. In the opener ‘Saku’, a blinkered guitar and e-piano motif stutters in endless cycles, fading in and out either end of the track as if mimicking the relentless reset of the seasons. ‘Tobiume’ revolves around surging currents of warm clav and glacial house pianos, ricocheting out over the rolling loop beds. ‘Uchu Tanjyo’ steps out into more humid, crepuscular terrain with its clattering hand percussion, snatches of ebullient spoken phrases and distant, breathy flutes landing us firmly in a similar microclimate to Jon Hassell’s fourth world heat-haze. ‘Hagoromo’ brings us back to the swaying reveries of the first two tracks, with undulating, contrapuntal harp figures eventually elapsing into Riley-esque rhodes canons, before standout track ‘Genshi’ juxtaposes Yokota’s familiar humming e-piano coils with a plosive 909 kick and oneiric bells, channelling his washier, more dub techno-adjacent efforts, as well as Tangerine Dream’s pointillist synth meditations and Steve Reich’s proto-rik minimalism.

‘Hisen’ is another curveball, built on the foundation of an intensely phased trip hop groove, with saccharine violin arpeggios and plaintive rhodes harmonisations, while ‘Azukiiro No Kaori’, perhaps the most arrestingly beautiful track on the album, revolves around an axis of cavernous, resonant - you guessed it - e-piano, with snatches of mellifluous vocal riding the thermals. The desolate, far-off city sparkle of ‘Kodomotachi’ sounds eerily like a prequel to Burial’s classic ‘In McDonalds’, while ‘Naminote’ revolves around a splashy, driving Chick Corea sample, evoking the entropic scrambles of Shibuya’s namesake crossing, before the soporific ‘Shinsen’ and glistening melodic arcs of ‘Kirakiraboshi’ evoke the last of the falling Sakura blossoms.

In 2006, Mexican Filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu approached Yokota to produce the soundtrack for his 2006 psychological drama Babel. Although Yokota could not accept this commission because of his deteriorating health, the centrepiece from Sakura, ‘Gekkoh’ was included in the soundtrack. Yokota had long harboured ambitions to compose for film, telling Ricketson that he would “like to work with Jean Pierre Jeunet and Vinsent Giaro and if it’s possible, to work with an old director, Parajanov”. Perhaps it is the seething undercurrents of emotion in Yokota’s work which gives it its cinematic quality- he had expressed an intention to “express ki-do-ai-raku (the four emotions; joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness) through music”, and throughout Sakura, the affect fluctuates between profound tranquillity, hesitation, melancholy, and joy with ease, addressing the fickle nature of human emotion, while transcending the inclination to label moods entirely.

About the organizers:

Lo Recordings has been in existence for over 20 years and is widely regarded as one of the most consistently innovative independent labels. Several years ago we developed two new labels: Loaf, for new artists and Loeb, for vinyl 12″s. This worked well initially but we now feel its easier to have them all back under one moniker. The Label is run by Hub 100 and the sister company Hub 100 Publishing who have developed a production music library imprint called Lo Editions in conjunction with UPPM (Universal Production Music).

M:sco Disco is a Mexican-American artist-record collector-DJ and HiFi enthusiast. He's the co-founder of Head Hi and musical director of the Head HiFi series. Music has always being part of M:sco's life, exploring different scenes from punk-rock to cumbia, attending raves in México City, San Francisco and New York City in the 1990's. In 1997, he worked at a record distributor in San Francisco, bought his first pair of Technics 1200s turntables and learned to beat-match while living in a sail boat. In the early 2000's, he had a web-radio show called Clandestino. He has DJed in countless underground parties, bars and lounges in NYC, as well as The Lot Radio, Public Records, H0L0, Sans Solei - Montreal Canada, and in cultural institutions like Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, El Museo del Barrio. Listen to M:sco Disco.

Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art, architecture, design and sound specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, exhibitions, music, performances and other events. Head HiFi enhances the experience of sound in the space with its vintage Klipsch La Scala speakers. @headhi_ny