Low Culture Essay: Jennifer Lucy Allan on Susumu Yokota

In this month’s Low Culture Essay, Jennifer Lucy Allan considers nostalgia and the Japanese idea of kona in the work of electronic pioneer Susumu Yokota. Subscriber Plus members will receive a playlist to accompany this in their inbox shortly.

The first time I tried to buy a Susumu Yokota album I was in my late teens. I picked up a copy of Image in Vinyl Exchange in Manchester's Northern Quarter. I was taken by the artwork: the vintage colour grading, the abstracted shape that could have been a tree branch or a spool of tape. It was inviting but felt important; those dates – 1983-1998 – were a promise of longevity; of material that might survive the passage of time. When I got it home, I found the wrong record in the sleeve. I did not go back to change it. I was too young, too embarrassed. 

I don't know where I would have first heard of Yokota. I know he was referenced regularly in the magazines and blogs I was reading then, when his early 00s albums like Sakura were already being hailed as key touchpoints for a wave of artists making what was then more often classed as electronica, and which is a genre now largely absorbed into ambient. When I recently listened to Image, for the first time in nearly 20 years, it became a time machine.

It played back from a past when I knew much less than I know now; when I was taking chances on music I had only read descriptions of, which often came detached from context or understanding. So, if I don't know where I first heard his music, I know I have been hearing his name since I began delving into electronic music, almost certainly because Leaf issued much of his Skintone catalogue. Listening to Image again now in its remastered form, I find an album that contains the triptych of feeling that is at the core of Yokota's sound, whatever sonic space he's occupying, a holy trinity of love offered, curiosity manifested, and an exercising of play with sound itself. He was a musician who sprawled across genres, a magpie for sound both recorded and in the world around him, and had a capacity for making connections for us in his music. The feeling that oozes from its signals are that of a most generous creator.