perfect

Susumu Yokota can be an intimidating artist to approach, which is why Lo Recordings’ Skintone Edition Volume 1 is immediately essential. Collecting the first seven albums released under Yokota’s own Skintone label, the box set neatly presents the most personal and esoteric work of the pioneering electronic house and ambient musician, doing the digging for you.

Yokota started the label in 1998, releasing albums under his own name after years of creating techno and house music under the pseudonyms Ebi, Tenshin, 246, Anima Mundi, and Stevia, among others. As such, the Skintone albums were reflective of Yokota’s innermost yearnings, less for clubs than headphones. In fact, the first two releases were produced in limited editions of 500 CDs each. He wasn’t trying to find an audience; he was trying to find himself.

Skintone Edition Volume 1 is almost like the first half of an autobiography discovered posthumously (Yokota died in 2015 at the age of 54). It begins with 1998’s Magic Thread, which immediately immerses the listener in its vast dub soundscapes. Mixing a slower, deeper version of the four-on-the-floor beats of his house music with intricately designed ambient tracks, Yokota’s first Skintone release was an intimate harbinger of things to come.

As the title implies, Image 1983-1998, the second Skintone release, is itself a collection of recordings spanning the titular 15 years. Across 14 tracks, Susumu Yokota experiments with guitar, organ, bells, samples, tape loops, and other musical instruments, manipulating their deconstruction to create fleeting yet magical moments. Granted, these feel like demos, accomplished sketches from an artist’s notebook, rather than completed works, with studies of individual instruments and techniques. Continuing the painterly metaphor, it’s more of a cubist or pointillist album than the minimalist and expressionist styles for which Yokota is known. 

While not quite the proverbial missing link, it’s still an interesting piece of the puzzle, showcasing the musician’s evolution from minimalist guitars toward synthesized ambient beauty. The album wears Yokota’s love for the short-lived post-punk band Young Marble Giants on its sleeve, no pun intended. In that sense, Image 1983 -1998 is both a testament to his inspirations and to the processes and styles that would influence him down the line.

The next album in the set, 1999’s Sakura, is widely regarded as Yokota’s most significant achievement and one of the best ambient albums of all time. This was the moment when the artist was able to bridge the gap between his intimate experiments and accessible appeal without any compromise, with the album getting picked up by the UK’s Leaf Label for European distribution. 

Sakura certainly lives up to the hype, and if you’re not willing to fork over the cash for this bespoke and beautiful box set, Lo Recordings released the individual remastered album on 26 September 2025. (They also have a 14-track album, Skintone Collection, which is a great but brief introduction to the artist.) It’s an essential text in the canon of electronic music, where Yokota assembles the fragmented harmonies of his earlier work into moments of pure bliss. It’s especially great to hear, after Image 1983-1998, the experiments with acoustic instrumentation coming to full fruition alongside a newfound cinematic grandiosity and synthesized sparkle.

After creating a few somewhat traditional but excellent electronic albums released outside the Skintone label (such as 1999 and Zero), Susumu Yokota returned to his own label for another distinctive, personal album. 2001’s Grinning Cat is a bit of a curveball in his discography, but rightfully beloved by his fans for its playful, jazzy rhythms, with Yokota emphasizing the piano more than ever. The production is just as cavernous as the previous Skintone releases, but the varied styles and jubilant tinkering add new layers of personality to the music.

Will, released the same year as Grinning Cat, is similarly fun but even more buoyant, bouncing along to uniquely programmed beats. Throwing in more sonic variety and endless ideas, Will is filled with musical non sequiturs and sometimes ridiculous surprises; it’s house music by way of slapstick comedy. The shortest title in Skintone Edition Volume 1, this fifth Skintone release is a quick blast of fun that’s perhaps most reminiscent of the early Skintone parties Yokota used to throw, which his label was named after (similar, in a way, to the Telepathic Fish parties in the UK around the same time). 

The sixth Skintone release, 2002’s The Boy and the Tree, marks a sharp departure from Yokota’s previous two albums, reflecting his restless and chimerical nature. The shape-shifting musician delved even deeper into the acoustic abyss, expanding the cinematic nature of Sakura while incorporating a swirling, psychedelic bent that’s alternately gripping and soothing. 

The Boy and the Tree feels like taking some ancient drug and participating in a secret ceremony. Yokota combines traditional Noh performance elements, including vocal chanting (utai), syllabic rhythm (chūnori), and classical instrumentation (hayashi), with natural sounds and samurai battle cries to create his most ritualistic work.

Finally, Laputa closes out Skintone Edition Volume 1 with the most complicated album of the set. The seventh Skintone release builds on the bombastic ceremonial quirks of The Boy and the Tree, but expands upon them with not only an epic, macrocosmic scope but meticulous microscopic intricacies. Laputa completes Susumu Yokota’s evolution away from house music, extricating the music from beats entirely.

Laputa features some of the most detailed drone music in existence, with Yokota’s punctilious production endlessly elaborating on what tends to be a monolithic aural texture. Yokota treats vocals like another processed instrument he has perfected, layering them to complement incredible blasts of aggressive synths and his usual penchant for subtle acoustic melodies. It was the most avant-garde album of Yokota’s career at the time, and confounded his fans and even the critics. Hearing it in the context of Skintone Edition Volume 1, however, provides the kind of context that makes Laputa seem like an almost natural next step, as Yokota tread deeper into the possibilities of sound.

It may be hard for some people to imagine ambient music expressing the full range of human emotion, but that was Susumu Yokota’s mission. He sought the musical equivalent of ki-do-ai-raku, the Japanese phrase for four major human emotions (joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure or comfort). ‘I’m trying to achieve that beautiful thing. There is always fear, rage, and ugliness existing behind beauty,” he once explained. “I have been trying to express ki-do-ai-raku through music. I would like to express even one’s hidden emotion with reality. It’s my eternal goal.”

Yokota poured himself into the albums on Skintone Edition Volume 1, and his emotions pour out of them as a result. “Songwriting was like a diary for him,” DJ Miku, who released some of Yokota’s albums on his Newstage label, told Wax Poetics after the musician’s death. “It was important for him to create music from what he felt in the moment. That’s why I think Yokota’s work is very emotional. He was never one to sacrifice the soul of a track to make it sound better. In other words, there is no lie in his works.”

Bringing together these personal albums in one magisterial set, Skintone Edition Volume 1 is a beautiful, powerful study of Susumu Yokota in his own words. It’s perfect in nearly every way (something reflected in its cost) – the remastering, the art and packaging, the selections. While several of Yokota’s albums, released under different aliases, are absolutely phenomenal and more accessible (Acid Mt. Fuji, Zen, Zero), the Skintone albums are his most honest and distinctive achievements. They are an evocative expression of the artist as seeker, devoted to discovery and the expansion of possibilities.