GRINNING CAT

Volume 1 - Album 4

One of Yokota's most loved releases that explores the intersection of jazz, new age ambience and a world of found sound and samples.

A1: I Imagine
A2: King Dragonfly
A3: Card Nation
A4: Balloon in a Cage

B1: Lapis Lazuli
B2: Cherry Blossom
B3: Sleepy Eye

C1: Love Bird C2: Fearful Dream C3: Tears of A Poet
D1: Flying Cat D2: So Red. D3: Lost Child

Including an essay by Wyndham Wallace in the liner notes...

.... “Imagination....’ Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat advised in the pages of Alice in Wonderland ‘...is the only weapon in the war with reality’. Grinning Cat couldn’t feel much less like combat, but, whether one relates to it intellectually or instinctively, emotional socery - always a great stimulator of the imagination - is critical to its charms. Shifting styles accross tracks and, moreover, within tracks, it exhibits a carefree disregard for conventions, creating an environment in which to revel while offering compelling triumphant proof of its fictional precursor’s doctrine’ ......

Although one of Susumu Yokota’s most stylistically varied works in the Skintone catalogue, Grinning Cat (2001) revolves largely around the piano- both sampled and seemingly played by Yokota himself. Across its thirteen deeply evocative tracks, he runs the gamut of emotions, stylistic hallmarks and timbres, albeit using a narrow palette of sound sources. A follow-up to the much loved Sakura, Grinning Cat represented an amoebic, energised and joyful chapter in Yokota’s career, where his recent successes and a move into a larger studio in Tokyo’s suburbs afforded him time to process his influences and refine his techniques across a multitude of styles, opening up countless potential directions for his work in the years to come.

While 1999’s Sakura seemed to draw heavily on the concept of ‘mono no aware’ or impermanence; a national melancholy associated with beauty and impermanence characterised by the meagre couple of weeks in which Japan’s cherry blossoms emerge, Grinning Cat latches on to the present moment with glee and inquisitiveness, fluctuating in tempo, rhythmic structure and arrangement in a way poignantly reminiscent of the chaos and delight of everyday life.

“Last summer,” Yokota wrote, “I started to live with my girlfriend and also three cats: mother cat, Tabasa, her son cat, Bindi, and her daughter black cat, Noa.

We all played together like having parties every day at home. The everyday life with cats is like a fairytale, and also it was like I met the Cheshire Cat in Alice In Wonderland. In my works, I always create philosophy and 'childlike' images. This album Grinning Cat came into existence because of having this wonderful life”. It is this preoccupation with everyday wonder and mystery, closer to the Buddhist concept of ‘yuugen’, which characterises Grinning Cat; a suggestion of profound beauty, mystery and joy in memory and imagination.

‘I imagine’ sets the tone for an immensely warm and rewarding listen, with tessellating, prepared piano-like loops soon entangling themselves with his signature vocal glossolalia and gently warping, percussive interjections, before the razor-sharp break and plosive ASMR handclaps of ‘King Dragonfly’ drop the listener back down to earth in a flurry of organic colour and light.

‘Card Nation’ follows on seamlessly, maintaining the pressure with cavernous Japanese percussion, breathy hisses and an airy, gothic atmosphere, evoking Future Sound of London’s mid-nineties soundscapes. The aptly named ‘Sleepy Eye’, a gentle tape loop lullaby, is swiftly chased by the humid cloud-forest resonance of ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and the jagged, Philip Glass-esque woodwind constructions of ‘Balloon In The Cage’.

Standout centrepiece ‘Cherry Blossom’ sees Yokota return to the hazy dub techno plateaus of Magic Thread, with submerged kickdrums and gauzy pads, before the omnipresent piano enters in naïve, plaintive cascades, and the stacked flurries of piano motif in ‘Love Bird’ evoke started flocks taking to the skies. he psychotropic 40s trouble-in-paradise film score moment ‘Fearful Dream’ leads us tumbling through spidering alleyways towards the stunning, smoky loucheness of the subterranean Gentle People-style exotica hybrid ‘Tears of a Poet’.

‘So Red’ continues in a tropical-gothic vein, with ominous lap-steel and patient, seductive drum loops, and the shimmering strings, plinky tuned percussion and splashy kitwork of ‘Flying Cat’, one of the most unabashedly joyful and bubbly entries in Yokota’s discography, lead us into the tentative, glitchy closer ‘Lost Child’.

Sentimental without being schmaltzy, joyful without being saccharine, Grinning Cat sees Yokota at his most playful and experimental, channelling moments of transitory wonder and jubilation, and opening up a sonic environment in which we can romp and play.