As time goes by and the albums pile up, Susumu Yokota's bedrock musical preoccupations have moved to the fore. Symbol, his latest album, is in a sense the finest encapsulation yet of his core aesthetic. It's not his best record (I am still partial to the restraint and austerity of Sakura), but is perhaps the clearest rendering yet of how he hears the world.
Most of the sounds on Symbol come from sampled classical music. Choice bits from famous and not-so-famous pieces are plucked from history, placed alongside Yokota's synths and programmed drums, and looped incessantly to create a dreamy quasi-ambient fabric of sound. The sample credits stretch on like a Dust Brothers album but most of the pilfered have been dead for 100 years or more. Generally the sources lean toward the romantic. Favored throughout are the rich, swirling strings and piano from composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky, and Yokota finds something pop in all of them. The wordless and ethereal female voice, a long established obsession of Yokota's, is also present. In addition to some original vocals several tracks incorporate samples of Meredith Monk, with her elastic tone veering from childlike whimsy to quasi-liturgical seriousness.
Setting works by famous composers set to beats was a pretty sizable cottage industry in the late 1970s and early 80s, but Yokota's approach is far removed from Hooked on Classics. Rather than using long and familiar sections of pieces, Yokota taps into the emotional material embedded in the sounds of certain instruments and severely truncated melodic fragments. Many samples remain for me, a classical novice, just below the identifiable threshold, something I've heard before in another context but can't quite place. This works to the music's advantage, as it toys with memory and the associations inherent in certain types of sound without giving itself away completely. Obvious exceptions like the loop of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and swell of Mussorgsky's "A Night on Bald Mountain" stuck into "Flaming Love and Destiny" break the record's spell, but these are exceptions.
It's an aesthetic that's easy to like, with a relentless prettiness so extreme at time it takes on an almost surreal quality. Something about Symbol says "ecstasy album" to me, with a mix and arrangements seem designed to highlight the music's considerable tactile qualities above all else. There's nothing life changing about Symbol but it's not that kind of record; ultimately it's a lush, ornate, and elegant celebration of the oft-maligned pleasure of pure surface-level beauty.
