The Boy And The Tree

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Frequently you may find an energetic and agile piece of Japanese traditional music abnormally calming and meditative in its effects. This influence on a European ear can be frequently explained with the piece's different fine-tuned rhythm layers, commonplace in Japanese musical tradition but not in many others.

Not all tracks on this album qualify for this introduction but most of them do, ensuring a thoroughly absorbing audio. Not only are we dragged into the texture of the piece, but also discreetly guided by its macro rhythm structures not manifest in the cortex. It may occasionally seem like, more than the actual piece itself, the music of your own mind, and 'The Boy and the Tree' is in fact a story of the artist's dream. This dream, a sequence of places, things and environments roots deeply in Japan, in its nature and tradition. After the still life like beginnings of 'The Coulour of Pomegranates' we reach to 'Live Echo' where rhythm polyphony is already evident. The same applies to 'Fairy Link', by then the album is already sounding distinctly Japanese, and continues to do so in 'Secret Garden', where the polyphonies of subdued female voices and rhythms merge. Witness from behind the trees a sudden merry-making in the otherwise foggy 'Beans', follow ye very persistent and annoyingly high-pitched loop pattern plaited to 'Thread Leads to Heaven', leading to 'Future Tiger', and be chased by it towards the misty and echo-drowned ending of the disk in 'Blood and Snow'. Susumu Yokota, extremely talented and prolific artist in both visual and acoustic fields, DJ, house and experimental music producer (and there must be other things I don't know of), has done it again.