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Rating: The air is clear, just stirred by a breath of wind.
A blade of grass between the teeth.
Legs stretched out, eyes half-closed on the vast open blue: a reversed and motionless sea.
From afar, the lazy toll of bells.
Speckled cattle traverse a brilliant green: moving spots on the rounded velvety shapes of the pastures.
Silence is traversed by the sinuous density of waves generated by guitar strings: a liquid massage at the base of thoughts.
Pulsating and vaporous trails of an invisible sound vehicle traveling toward its destination: the funny shell at the bottom of your ear's fleshy cavity.
Echoes of overlapping and distant voices, impossible memories of an indeterminate East: dream of a midsummer afternoon.
Senses numbed, the world around numbed.
A kind of beatitude.
In which float fragments of visions: moods in the form of sounds.
Towards the end of 2005, Yokota, in collaboration with Mark Beazley of Rothko, released this “Distant Sounds Of Summer.”
It is a work characterized by rarefaction, oriented towards an ambient that is at times naturalistic, bucolic. In which the soft and dissolved sound of Beazley's guitars proves to be perfectly functional (which I read is the leader of an unusual post-rock band, the Rothko, which included three bassists).
Ten tracks, mostly instrumental, very evocative. Suspended between the descriptive temptation, which indeed also includes the use of cowbells, and hypnotic and ecstatic dilation. Suitable for soundtracking afternoons sunk in indolence or evenings dissolved in the quiet observation of a time that seems in stand by, hostage to an apparent circularity.
Yokota dispenses stylish sounds, rare rhythmic bases always destined, except for a couple of episodes (where he seems to want to break it), to support the fluidity of the compositions.
The voice appears rarely, gliding over the waves of the liquefied sound compound prepared by the two. And it's that velvety, warm, and persuasive voice of Caroline Ross, co-author, the same year, along with Rothko, of another interesting album, “A Place Between.”
A summer of almost impressionistic evanescence, the one evoked by the Japanese and his companion.
But the “distance” of “his sounds” from the desire for any elsewhere has never been so minimal while I listen immersed in a sultry afternoon of this urban June.
P.S.: I came to Yokota following trails scattered in DeBaser and purchasing what some, including him, deem to be his most successful and ambitious work, “Symbol.”
The twenty-fifth chapter of a discography marked by impressive prolificity, published in the first half of 2005, gathered the fruit of a daring attempt to combine, through electronics, fragments of over two centuries of music.
A meticulous chiseling work allowed Mr. Susumu to draw 13 paintings, with fragments of music by Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Ravel, Mahler, Tchaikovsky Debussy, Philip Glass, Steve Reich assembled with the sounds produced in his technological laboratory. Without the result sounding tacky or redundant. On the contrary, it is a very dense but airy album, at times of a luxuriant elegance. Where the voice, in that case of Meredith Monk, (one of the reasons for my purchase) became an additional element in the sound landscape. Recommended (4)
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