Susumu Yokota

“Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties”.

Magic Thread is Susumu Yokota’s deeply soothing and delicate debut release on the Skintone label, written during one of the happiest and most productive periods of his career. The sprawling LP incorporates the dubby, washy 00s leftfield house and techno soundscapes he’d been soaking in at his low-key ‘Skintone’ residents’ party at club LUST in Tokyo’s Ebisu district, as well as a vast array of psychedelic field recordings and organic sonic abstractions. It is perhaps the quiet feeling of connection and community which Yokota was feeling at the time which gives Magic Thread its air of warmth and playfulness; even the title is a utopian idiom of togetherness. It also, however, retains a distinct aura of creeping mystery and windswept isolationism, hinting at his output to come.

Over the album’s 11 tracks, Yokota conveys an overarching sense of urban vastness, peace, and ominous anticipation, with ambient reveries like ‘Fiber’ playing like susurrating signals in quiet and dense urban spaces; humming telegraph lines over empty Naka-meguro parking lots and the distant sound of surging superhighways. ‘Stitch’ begins with a vacant, questing pad, transfixed as if by the hypnotic twitching of the Tokyo horizon seen from a high and distant point, before descending into a subterranean network of synapse-tickling digital interference. The disarmingly groovy shuffler ‘Circular’ looms like a spectral figure between seas of heads on the metro or violet dusk over a glittering skyline, while the persistent mechanoid clank of ‘Metabolic’ summons entropic scenes: hoards of skittish commuters, the constant drone of office telephones and pings of overworked appliances.