Prolific Japanese techno/ambient producer Susumu Yokota has won many hearts around the world with his elegant excursions into sound.
Albums like Magic Thread and Sakura have highlighted his talent for concocting magical soundscapes that ebb and flow as gently as the wind but contain a deceptively bewitching power.
Grinning Cat is simply one more flight of fancy for Yokota, though is no less potent than previous works for the listener.
Using some newly obtained pet cats as inspiration (he allegedly felt he had met the Cheshire Cat from Alice In Wonderland such are the child-like mechanics of Yokota's mind), he has built another wonderful world of sounds and shapes.
Hypnotic piano loops are a firm Yokota favourite and on the opener 'Imagine' they're played through a mist of gentle synth until meeting a ghostly female voice drifts and other, discordant sounds. Already you can sense that this music is as lucid and weightless as the stuff of dreams, but this is only one aspect of his child-like innovations. On 'King Dragonfly', he enthusiastically indulges in some hip hop rolls and subliminal chanting as well as disembodied sounds and errant clunks.
Throughout the LP, strange instruments and sound effects float in and out of the aural scenery like mysterious shadows, creating a feeling of caprice and whimsy. Yokota has no problem with stopping dead in his tracks and changing direction, though he generally keeps the odd motif recurring so as not to stray too far from hypnotic remit of looped rhythm and sound.
Tracks like 'Sleepy Eye' see Yokota at his lullaby-esque best; a simple piano melody is fed through FX that give it a dreamy blur, before being joined by fairy-tale glissandos. His techno influences come to the fore on the beat-ridden but innocuous 'Cherry Blossom', while 'So Red' uses acoustic guitar and disembodied voices in a kind of hard drive blues track.
Overall, Yokota's music will appeal to those who have a brain to massage or a child still alive in their heart.
