MAGIC THREAD

Volume 1 – Album 1

“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.”

– Susumu Yokota, 1998.

Yokota’s startling debut release on the Skintone label. Full of mystery and wonder, mixing his love of deep house beats, eclectic ambience and sampladelic oddysey.

A1: Weave
A2: Reflux
A3: Unravel

B1: Circular
B2: Spool
B3: Fiber

C1: Potential
C2: Metabolic

D1: Stitch
D2: Blend
D3: Melt

Including an essay from Ken Hollings in the liner notes....

‘... The smoothness and roundness of the thread are signs of its efficiency. One of the earliest pieces of functioning machinery in existence, its magic lies in the unseen changes it brings about — unseen at the time of their making, that is....’

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.

Intended initially for a Japanese market, Magic Thread came out on a limited-edition CD release of 500 copies, heralding the birth of Yokota’s imprint for his more experimental, introspective, and wide reaching productions.

Unlike his later, more cinematic efforts, however, it retains a strong foot in the techno sphere, with tracks like ‘Reflux’ and ‘Potential’ flying close to the shuffling, pared-back proto-minimal reconstitutions of the Mille Plateaux camp and Voigt brothers. What sets it apart is its slick, centrifugal employment of ostensibly acoustic timbres, from the prepared piano rumble underpinning the factory-belt beat of ‘Reflux’ to the almost Hassell-esque water drum intonations keeping ‘Spool’ bobbing along, and the spatial, metronomic guiro squelch on ‘Blend’.

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.

On the otherwise-threadbare jacket of the original CD, Yokota included the following unattributed quote - “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”. The loom is one of the earliest pieces of functioning machinery in existence, and on this album, Yokota employs thread as a pertinent analogy for his musical process, weaving strands of musical influence and scraps of sonic fabric into a tapestry that is far more than the sum of its constituent parts. With a spartan palette of sounds and textures, he taps into a fundamentally human need to fuse and connect disparate fibres, magically forming work which glistens and pulsates with life.