THE BOY AND THE TREE

Volume 1 - Album 6

Yokota at his most enigmatic and profound. A deeply psychedelic voyage into a world of ritual and magic.

A1: The Colour of Pomegranates
A2: Live Echo
A3: Fairy Link

B1: Secret Garden
B2: Grass, Tree and Stone.
B3: Rose Necklace

C1: Plateau on Plateau
C2: Red Swan
C3: Beans

D1: Future Tiger
D2: Threads Lead to Heaven
D3: Blood and Snow

Including an essay by Carl Griffin in the liner notes....

... “As we all now know, the prodigiously prolific Sumumu Yokota never repeated himself, as was his wont and as was the nature of his searching appetite for new creative impetus. In the weeks leading-up to the making of this extraordinary album Yokota had taken a restorative and perhaps revelatory trip to Yakushima Island.”...

In the weeks leading up to the studio sessions which birthed Susumu Yokota’s 2002 album The Boy And The Tree, he visited Japan’s Yakushima Island, an outstandingly beautiful world heritage site off the southern tip of Japan, jutting out into the East China Sea. As well as a beach with protected status as a loggerhead turtle nesting site, the island is scored by a deep, lush and ancient ravine, The ‘Shiratani Unsuikyo’. Nestled in the gorge is a much mythologised ancient tree, the potentially 7000-year old ‘Jōmon Sugi’. It is these sloping, verdant forests where Hayao Miyazaki found inspiration for his 1997 epic Princess Mononoke, a groundbreaking anime addressing the conflict between the rampant greed and destructive force of humanity, and the stoic, mysterious fragility of nature. It is no secret that Yokota was a fan of this film, and it is clear from the work he created in the wake of his visit that he was hugely inspired by the breathtaking majesty of the island.

This fleeting immersion in nature lent the album a profound introspection and mystery, and the its twelve tracks unfold in dream sequence, each drifting seamlessly into the next while still managing to steer the listener in myriad directions, from eerie butoh atmospheres, to ebullient raga, to desolate, cavernous chanson.

The Boy And The Tree is definitely one of, if not the most, visually evocative and cinematic Yokota releases, and where Grinning Cat or Will were visually and thematically shackled to the electric hustle of Tokyo, it looks instead to the revelatory quietness of the rolling hills and sweeping coastlines of Yakushima, a place of refuge which prompted Yokota to extract himself “a few times a week” from his suburban home to follow in the ancient, winding arteries of the forest. Yokota once told music journalist Bim Rickson “Walking amongst the big trees, I can hear my heartbeat and the echoes of the earth”, and on The Boy And The Tree, these forest resonances are audible, unfurling in a strikingly organic way as if Yokota is merely documenting the soundscape of one of his forest rambles.

It is ostensibly his most Japanese-sounding album, from the woven, resounding ronin warrior cries in ‘Live Echo’ to the blissful pentatonic washes over ‘Rose Necklace’ and the warbling noh chants and ceremonial bells on ‘Red Swan’. This inkling of nostalgic pride in the ancient arts of Japan is offset, however, by a gentle new-age utopianism. Throughout the album, Yokota unselfconsciously incorporates samples from global musical traditions; see the pulsing earth raga of ‘Grass, Tree and Stone’, or the driving gamelan phrases of ‘Secret Garden’, for instance, which still manage to steer well clear of any patronising ‘10 hours of zen garden meditation sounds’ atmospheres.

The aspect of Yokota’s art which set him apart from many artists in his milieu wasn’t as much the raw and well trodden subject matter itself, but more the way it was treated, with a unique tastefulness and knack for unexpected juxtaposition.

The wafting strains of reed pipe and cricket-like ambience on ‘Beans’ could fly close to vapid lounge atmospheres in the wrong hands, but Yokota splices the samples in a way which preserves their essence while maintaining an acousmatic mystique; short phrases loop in increasingly mechanical cycles, making the listener question their provenance in the same way a word loses its meaning when repeatedly spoken.

Just like Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime, The Boy And The Tree is at once a subtle and quietly stunning ode to the fragile majesty of nature, a reverent cry for humanity to rally and protect what is essential to our survival, and an intoxicating homage to the spirit in all earthly things.