Susumu Yokota - Laputa

Susumu Yokota
Laputa (Skintone Edition)
Lo Recordings
Japan/UK, 2003/2026
2LP

The most abstract and experimental record in Yokota’s legendary Skintone run, Laputa is enjoying late recognition as a deconstructed masterpiece. Too trippy to be “ambient,” Yokota nevertheless brings the incredible sense of dynamics, mood-building, and control that he developed as a dance producer to a set of melted-clock abstractions primed for late-night mind expansion. Yokota famously said that he would like his music to express the four emotions, ki-do-ai-raku: joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. While I struggle to find much anger in his work, Laputa is the closest he comes to alienation and confusion, with bursts of sun-shower beauty contributing to a total effect of immersive and captivating ambivalence.

If Yokota’s Skintone discography were just these seven records, it would still be one of the most compelling runs in millennial electronic music. But hang tight: there are seven more reissues coming.

FROM THE LABEL:

Susumu Yokota’s Laputa (2003) is perhaps his most challenging, foreboding and perplexing body of work. Over fifteen undulating sonic fugue states, he guides listeners round a liminal world, made up of familiar materials but formed in a way defying all laws of perspective and physics. Like the impossible perspective of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings, background murmurings give way to almost uncomfortably foregrounded chattering, and one perceived soundstage segues into another impossible tableau of sonic apparitions, some recognisable in form, but all boldly decontextualised and arranged in expertly cluttered amalgams. The twisting, ‘penguin pool at London Zoo’ form on the cover also alludes to this Escher-esque collision of sonic angles, its arcing petal-like plateau spiralling into oblivion and calling to mind Le Corbusier’s 1958 Philips Pavilion, housing Iannis Xenakis and Varèse’s similarly disembodied sequence of sonic artefacts, Poème Électronique. Although possibly Yokota’s first entirely beatless work, it does not share the capital A ambient nature of Eno’s forays into discreet music, or the soothing soundscapes more readily associable with The Boy and The Tree, his previous effort on the Skintone label. 

Instead, it rewards deep and intentioned listening; watching sounds and textures pass by in a seductive dream sequence. Not one to stick on while entertaining friends or spring cleaning. 

‘Rising Sun’ gently sets the tone for a vivid trip, with its deep, resonant monastic drones, band-passed signal interference and eerie operatic wails, before the antigravitational tone float of ‘Lost Ring’ leads the listener into the cosmic ping pong match of the onomatopoeic ‘gong gong gong’, a spiritual prequel to composers like Alexi Baris and Ulla Straus’ expansive audio patchworks. The mellower ‘Iconic Air’ fuses a plodding, space-lounge bassline with metallic dub techno sound FX and overtone atmospheres, and the nearly avant-pop abstraction on ‘Light of The Sun’ leads us into the plinky, isolationist centrepiece ‘Grey Piano’, channelling Arvo Pärt’s austere tintinnabulations. ‘7 Degrees Dream’ guides us back towards deep-space cocktail party ambience before the sinister, cinematic warning tones of ‘Hidden Love’ preempt the bitonal chaos of ‘Trip Eden’. The borderline cheesy, questing synths of ‘True Story’ are soon undermined by mischievous, formant-shifted vocalisations, and colossal synth stalactites glisten on the aptly named ‘Dragon Place’. 

The almost disconcertingly gentle ‘I am flying’ eases us into soporific bliss, before ‘Dizzy Echo’, ‘Heart By Heart’, and the percussive stride of ‘Hyper on Hyper’ end the album on a flustered, breathless note, dropping us back to reality with a thud and a cosmic pat on the back.

Another factor setting Laputa apart from the eternal chin-stroke of both ambient and avant garde camps is its use of unflinchingly synthetic sounds and textures, as well as pop detritus. Take ‘Lost Ring’ for instance, where soaring, Jimmy Smith-style rotary hammond licks circle overhead, crying out in a vacuum otherwise permeated by mostly uncanny, humanoid chattering, or ‘23 Degrees Dream’, where 80s city-pop synth lines, clumsy blues guitar twangs, and shoegazy vocal mantras bob in the void. This aspect of Yokota’s music speaks to his profound mastery and appreciation of the twin disciplines of popular and ‘art’ music, a dichotomy which a handful of critics dourly and categorically failed to understand on the release of his first non-dance efforts. Sucks to be them. Laputa is the sound of Yokota casually shrugging off all expectations and artistic inhibitions.