Susumu Yokota - Laputa, 2x Vinyl LP
Susumu Yokota - Laputa, 2x Vinyl LP
Overlooked at the time of its release, 'Laputa' is among Susumu Yokota's prettiest and most misunderstood albums, the fabled link between 'The Boy and the Tree' and 'Symbol'.
'Laputa' is a good one - so good, in fact, that it prompted Lo Recordings to work on the Skintone retrospective box set in the first place. You see, the album was never properly released globally; it emerged on Yokota's Skintone label in 2002 but was only really available in Japan. Leaf had handled its predecessor 'The Boy and the Tree' and Lo had stepped in to release 'Symbol', leaving 'Laputa' without a home. So that's all corrected here and we can finally enjoy Yokota's "lost" album in its full glory.
Named after the floating island of 'Gulliver's Travels' that Hayao Miyazaki used as the inspiration for 'Laputa: Castle in the Sky', the album features some of Yokota's most celestial cues, windy, cinematic experiments that pulled further and further away from his earlier dancefloor work or even the dusty, break-led experiments that anchored 'Grinning Cat'. Here, he makes even Murcof's grim, glitchy techno sound airy and effervescent, sampling the Mexican producer on 'Lost Ring' and juxtaposing the piano stabs and po-faced strings with guitar vamps, shouts, sax solos and TV interference.
At its best, the album sounds like hearing sound from a TV wall, each screen playing a different movie. Baroque twangs get muddled with dusty Americana and sci-fi themes are melted with sacred music while some chopped-to-ribbons jingle vibrates somewhere overhead. Like all of Yokota's later records, it's sound collage work that showed his sheer skill as a sampler and selector, blending church bells with kosmische synth sequences ('Dizzy Echo') and 'Guitar Phase' minimalism with reverberating pop lullabies ('Hyper on Hyper').
