Susumu Yokota had a wry sense of humour and was at the same time prone to melancholy tones, his work ranging from caustic techno to fragile yet lushly arranged ambient. Already during his lifetime, but at the latest with his premature death, a real personality hype has developed around the composer and producer—in other words, the reissue industry is re-releasing everything that it can get hold of. The Spanish label Glossy Mistakes has now picked up two albums released in the late 1990s under Yokota’s pseudonym Stevia. While »Greenpeace« with its funk samples and airy breaks exuded a certain Sunday afternoon mood, »Fruits of the Room«, released in 1997, stands more for a kind of rave abstractionism: New York deep house, Detroit techno and house or British varieties of dance music, starting with acid house to ambient techno to jungle, are taken up by Yokota and translated into a dreamy soundscape. This exploration and re-evaluation of the recent past of dance music history is situated at the end of the great forward movements and the beginning of an all-encompassing exhaustion. But at the same time it speaks about hope, about a future of the utopian dreams expressed by them, something that is inherent in the pieces to this day and gives them a momentum that is difficult to grasp. A real Susumu Yokota is deeply ambivalent.
Various Artists
John Gómez & Nick the Record present »Tangent«
Mr Bongo