Midweek Beats + Pieces vol.23

Susumu Yokota aka Stevia, Hydroplane, various odds and ends.

Good morning, good afternoon, or perhaps good evening? I’m trying to get ahead of myself this week, so am rushing the newsletter out the door early Wednesday evening. Nature is healing, blah blah, or something to that effect. This week’s photos were taken with Kodak Portra 800 film on a Nikon F60 camera, before being developed and scanned by Splendid.

AN ANNOUNCEMENT:

I’ve been working on this one for a bit, so I was very happy to see it go live yesterday. I wrote the media materials for the forthcoming Glossy Mistakes reissues of Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace by Susumu Yokota aka Stevia.

In 1997 and 1998, the late great Japanese composer, producer, and DJ Susumu Yokota released two of the most eclectic albums of his decades-long career, Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace. Recorded under his Stevia alias for Tokyo Techno pioneer DJ Miku’s Newstage Records/NS-COM, they were Yokota-san’s homage to the foundational days of club music in Japan.

This year, Glossy Mistakes are proud to present the first official vinyl editions of Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace, originally released on CD during the golden days of the format. Packaged in reimagined cover artwork created by the celebrated Japanese visual artist Masaho Anotani, these two albums perfectly capture the diversity at the heart of Yokota-san’s oeuvre. Across Fruits of The Room, he takes us on an expansive odyssey through his personal visions for deep house, street soul, jungle/drum & bass, digital dub and the slipstream moments between genres. To complement this, Greenpeace sees Yokota-san conjuring up a heady concoction of dusty loops, sampledelic breaks, kraut-rock and psychedelic downbeat. 

However, to understand Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace properly, one needs to understand the context Yokota-san created them within. As DJ Miku sees it, dance music in Tokyo was a broad church in the early nineties. “Within the framework of what is known as the techno scene, many different sub-genres such as trancey techno, minimal, hardcore, melodic German trance and Detroit techno co-existed,” he says. Thinking back, he remembers an era where DJs played with a high degree of freedom to open-minded audiences. 

All of that changed in 1995 when things began to fracture. Within the scene DJ Miku and Yokota-san were in at the time, a sharp divide emerged between hard minimal and goa trance. “There was also a branching out from techno, with other genres such as tech house and drum’n’bass,” he reflects. “What emerged from that was the birth of many all-night parties where only a specific genre of music would be played.” For DJ Miku and Yokota-san, filtering their musical interests down to a single genre was never an option. In the wake of this shift, Kazu-san established Newstage Records/NS-COM in 1996. With his label, he offered Yokota-san and his peers the opportunity to create with genreless creative freedom and a perspective that looked outward into the world.

When Yokota-san wrote and produced the music for Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace in 1997, he was reflecting on the broader culture that surrounded dance music in Japan in the early to mid-nineties. It was an era when the psychedelic culture of late sixties America, the afterglow of UK acid house/rave, the new age movement and cyberpunk dovetailed together. Within DJ Miku and Yokota-san’s social circles, the thinking of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs electrified the air. 

By 1996, the moment, brilliant and blinding as it was, was over. “We all felt that the rave scene fizzled out,” DJ Miku says. As he puts it, there was a collective feeling around him that it had all become too much. From the calm that followed, DJ Miku, Yokota-san and their open-eared peers made the decision to switch tracks and start from scratch. DJ Miku believes that with his Stevia releases, Fruits of The Room and Greenpeace, Yokota-san wanted to express the sweet and sour nature of the passing of those wild early days and his wish for true peace. “At the time, we saw eye-to-eye, with an implicit understanding of each other,” he explains. “Even now, twenty-five years later, I am confident it was like that.”  

AN INTERVIEW:

"Whether it's just because of how badly recorded it is, the noise, tape hiss and that creates an element of atmosphere as well. I guess if it was done more pristine, it wouldn't be the same. We were just working with what we had, a Tascam 4-track recorder."

I interviewed Australian musician and producer Andrew Withycombe about Hydroplane, the cult ambient-pop band he shared with Kerrie Bolton and Bart Cummings. Before Hydroplane, the trio played together with drummer Cameron Smith in the now-féted Melbourne indie-pop group The Cats Miaow. My conversation with Andrew, which covers both bands, is live now on Test Pressing here.

ODDS + ENDS:

Abigail Aroha Jensen aka M4URI M4STA has recorded a great mix of Ngā Taonga Pūoro (Māori musical instruments) field recordings and improvised arrangements for Jess Fu’s APEX show on Dublab. You can listen to it here.

Daryl Worthington has been writing about the Iranian Electronic Underground for Bandcamp. Read his feature here.

Jordan Reyes is looking for poems/literary work for an upcoming literary journal he is releasing. Jordan has a number of pieces already but needs some more. Small honorarium. Theme/premise is “unity leads to stability.” Please email submissions to jordan@american-dreams.zone for consideration.

FIN.