Susumu Yokota

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.