There is a massive iceberg looming underneath the music we know from Susumu Yokota's work with Leaf. In his native Japan he's released an uncountable number of records under many different names in every dance music style imaginable, and this IDM/ambient stuff is seen as an esoteric side project. Meanwhile, though he's never made much of an impact on the stateside dance scene, those interested in more abstract electronics have shown an increasing interest in the ambient series started in the last few years, highlights of which include Sakura and Grinning Cat.
I mention Yokota's tangled history to point up that, despite his prodigious output, he never makes the same album twice. Though his records on Leaf sometimes share certain moods and qualities, Yokota is constantly varying arrangements and instrumental textures. With The Boy and the Tree, Yokota discards completely the hushed, patient melodies of Sakura and Grinning Cat and builds most tracks around sampled percussion. The dynamic range is still flat enough for many of these tracks to sound calm and internal, but I would hesitate to use the word "ambient" to describe a good half of this record.
Yokota's primary interest on The Boy and the Tree seems to be the emotional quality of percussion as it inhabits an acoustic space. The woodblocks, djembe, and metallic bells that fill up "Live Echo" aren't ordered into particularly interesting patterns, but the way they seem to bounce off the stone enclosures that surround them is intriguing. "Grass, Tree and Stone" has similarly steady and repetitive drums at its core, and it adds the kind of twitching guitar reverb one associates with Ennio Morricone. Both these tracks have buried somewhere in the percussion wailing tribal voices of indeterminate origin. "Plateau on Plateau" also uses loops of processed guitar and voices, but the percussion here comes from bells and what sounds like hands beating on thick leather pads.
A few other tracks on The Boy and the Tree follow the same template as the ones I've mentioned, and for the most part, I find this lot to be on the dull side. The tight, unwavering way Yokota has sequenced these loops makes it too easy for them to slip completely into the background. Once the layers fall in and the sounds are set in motion, the pattern basically repeats until Yokoto pulls the plug. The drum sounds chosen come from the family of percussion most of us would associate with collective activity-- improvisations, celebrations, drum circles and the like. And without the variation that comes from communication, the tracks seem flat and lifeless, if sonically impressive.
But The Boy in the Tree has a handful of stunning tracks-- Yokota is just too talented for it to be otherwise. The cooing voices on "Secret Garden", though set against an overly repetitive acoustic guitar pattern, are haunting, and Yokota wisely cuts the almost too-beautiful voices with odd swells of noise. And while I can't say "Thread Leads to Heaven" is the most original of tracks (it's basically a minimalist canon thing played on what sounds like a toy organ), I am utterly powerless to resist its wide-eyed charm and simple sense of wonder. So, the mildly curious shouldn't worry about missing this Yokota release. Besides, there will certainly be another one along shortly.
