WILL

Volume 1 – Album 5

Yokota's most upbeat and playful release on the Skintone label. A wild melange of bumping beats, freestyle samples and esoteric goodness.

A1: Level 21
A2: Alpine Nation

B1: Red Door.
B2: Illusion River

C1: Pegasus Man
C2: Black Sea

D1: Pony Tail.
D2: Rabbit Earring

Including an essay by Ben Eshmade in the liner notes...

... “This album is still a strong statement of absurdity, perversity and humour from a composer who was by his mid-career. crackling and buzzing with electricity of infinite ideas. Here are stories he told in sound, inspired by energy, sweat, smell and recollected glamour of a hazy, lost dance floor”...

Will is in many senses, an anomaly in the Skintone catalogue. On inspection, the artwork echoes the monochromatic minimalism of his previous effort of the same year, Grinning Cat, with its trompe l'oeil horizontal bars revealing a hazy italic rendering of the word Will in the bottom right-hand corner. This canny visual trickery also characterises the sonic imprint of the record, which shares the playfulness and jubilation of Grinning Cat, but looks more to the soulful, sashaying instrumentation on its spiritual predecessors 1998 and 1999 on Tokyo’s Sublime Records. It is, in a way, strange that it didn’t drop on Sublime, but given Yokota’s withdrawal from the proscriptive and commercialised Tokyo techno scene in 1998, it makes sense that he would unleash any future dance music efforts on his own label; an ode to his legendary Skintone party, where friends would play a wide and loose range of deep, filter, french and oddball house sounds of the time. It is into this world which Will is launched, with its structures and sample choices slotting it in with the early 00s house and broken beat zeitgeist.

What sets it apart however, is Yokota’s mastery of timbre and juxtaposition, with crystal cascades of acoustic trickery riding organic, rolling drum programming and bold rearrangements of the conventional mixer levels on many house records of the time.

The shortest of Yokota’s Skintone releases, Will loses no momentum and immediacy across its seven, six-minute tracks. ‘Level 21’ blends parallel rhodes action with dreamy, technicolour trails of square-wave synth and churning breaks, before the off-kilter chug of ‘Alpine Nation’ brings us into more intrinsically ‘skintone’ territory with its detuned guitar garbles and disembodied vocal fragments. ‘Red Door’ is a washy, broken bossa in the tradition of Alex Attias and the early Hospital records catalogue, replete with orchestra-hall one shots and coiling conga rolls, and ‘Illusion River’ is a mellow, Parrish-esque shuffler, juxtaposing blunted rhodes chords with warbling choirs in unmistakably Susumu style.

‘Pegasus Man’ continues on an intensely groovy broken beat tip, flying at times, dangerously close to buddha bar lounge sensibility, but steered away by Yokota’s intentionally fractious sampling style, before ‘Black Sea’ taps into an early 00s Photek-adjacent sound palette, with imperious organ pulses and distant washes of oneiric pad easing the listener back into the smoke.

The unabashed disco house heater ‘Pony Tail’ - sampling Bohannon’s high voltage boogie classic ‘Let’s Start The Dance’ no less - ruthlessly surges into the more pensive, abstract closing ditty ‘Rabbit Earring’, fusing rambling piano figures with buoyant soul breaks and flirtatious vocal choppage.

Initially only appearing as a limited, vinyl-only release, it is clear that Will was intended as a low-key and cathartic return to Yokota’s bread and butter- house music. Perhaps a dubplate intended to soundtrack the small hours at Ebisu’s intimate LUST club, where his friends would gather and share recent musical discoveries.

Its eight tightly wound, cyclic grooves certainly conjure images of rambling, neon-lit Tokyo alleyways and late-night shenanigans, while also maintaining an air of cosiness and familiarity, as if they were composed with a certain room or soundsystem in mind. Piano is a recurring theme, entering the mix in a way more readily associable with Larry Heard or Kenny Larkin’s groove alchemy than the choppy impressionism of Reich and Glass referenced on Grinning Cat. If Grinning Cat was a playful exploration of memory and hazy jubilation, Will is a cathartic surrender to the groove, intended for the feet as much as the mind.