In the liner notes for Susumu Yokota’s 1998 album, Image 1983-1998, the celebrated electronic music producer, writes about his evangelical conversion to techno. Describing how, upon hearing acid house, he began to visualise music – a sort of synaesthesia – where rhythms, for example, became jumping shrimp, or “Ebi”, in Japanese (1). The tail was the kick, the crustacean’s limbs were the high-hats and snares. He confesses that for a period his “life became techno”, and that every waking moment was spent constructing banging tunes. He also reveals how he even saw these repetitive structures while he slept. 

With a background in visual art, and a successful career as a graphic designer, Susumu translated his skill with composition and collage to music, via the sampler. For years this need to create excluded everything else. This obsessive compulsion, and his eccentricity, are highlighted, humorously, by the anecdote that when attending Tokyo’s nightspots Susumu could sometimes be spotted with a Roland TB-303 slung around his neck – jamming away with the DJ, not in performance, but in private, on headphones, for himself (2).

These stories go some way toward explaining Susumu`s incredible, inordinate output between 1992’s Brainthump E.P. and 2012’s Dreamer L.P. He employed a total of 11 aliases – not counting his given name – and worked with a large number of mainly Japanese labels before launching his own imprint, Skintone, in 1998.

At the turn of the 2000s, Yokota started to become highly revered in western electronica circles. This was due in no small part to his delicate, intricate masterpiece, Sakura. Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Thom Yorke were all very vocal famous fans (3). Yokota’s releases have been highly sought after ever since. 

His debut L.P., however, wasn’t delicate or intricate. Instead it was pumping, pounding, trance. German label Harthouse put The Frankfurt-Tokio-Connection out in 1993, and on the (industrial) strength of it, Yokota was booked to play at Berlin’s Love Parade. Both the album and the gig were key in helping Japanese techno artists gain recognition outside of their homeland.

Yokota’s sophomore set, Acid Mt. Fuji, was cut from similar sonic cloth, and was also hugely important. It was the first Japanese techno album to be released on a Japanese label. It shared this honour with Ken Ishi’s Reference To Difference. Both CDs were issued on the same day, by the same imprint, Manabu Yamazaki’s Sublime Records. Sublime was spun out of Yamazaki’s techno party, Maniac Love – which itself at the time, in Japan, was groundbreaking – where Ishi and Yokota  regularly attended and performed. 

The album opens with wildlife whistles, monkey screeches and elephant roars. Field recordings such a these pepper and add texture to the entire proceedings, and despite the machines he used, illustrate Yokota’s passionate desire to reconnect with nature. The rhythms are tribal. Often starting slow, and almost ceremonial. Gradually evolving into something more boisterous and body-moving. Synths are like sirens, didgeridoos, or snake-charming, whirling dervish drones. Trance-dancing into sometimes dark shadowy corners. The echo can feel cavernous, and in places this, combined with the stripped back sound has an EBM / industrial effect. Titles, such as Kinoko, built about pinpoints of robotic percussion, recall Sabres Of Paradise’s more metallic moments, such as their radical reworks of Bjork (4).

Acid Mt. Fuji’s tracks are sort of split between mad, military marches, and Relief Records-like conniption fits. As well as Chicago’s Green Velvet, there are allusions to Detroit and Underground Resistance’s Red Planet. The biggest parallel though is with Richie Hawtin, and the Canadian’s Plastikman and FUSE projects. This is probably because both Hawtin and Yokota were exploring the possibilities of extremely limited kit. Yokota frequently works and filters his TR-909 a la Plastikman’s Spastik. He also does that Hawtin thing, of using delay to create drum rolls. Occasionally Yokota comes close to old school acid house, but when he does it’s pitched-up, Plus 8.

Yokota’s nasty, gnarly duelling TB-303s have more in common with his Harthouse label mates, Hardfloor and Sven Vath, than vintage jack. Alphaville has its simple rhythm hammered out on an anvil and then EQ-ed into a huge bass drum, while layers of programmed percolations, racing cymbals and high-hats, plus thunder crack hand claps, pile on the the drama and tension. The original album’s closer, Tanuki, is its gentlest groove. Surfacing from cicadas, with pretty steel pan-like chimes, before dissolving into sampled surf.

Acid Mt. Fuji takes no (Tekno?) prisoners (5). It’s not introspective, wistful or ambient. Everything on it is a big room banger (6). Even those with extended intros. If you were to skip through the music might seem to lack subtlety, however, a deeper listen definitively demonstrates Yokota’s real genius for creating compelling, hypnotic tracks from less than a handful of components. It’s this gift, of crafting the illusion of complexity through clever, careful use of looped patterns and counterpoint, that also makes his later, far, far mellower gear standout.   

Susumu Yokota’s Acid Mt. Fuji can be ordered directly from Musicmine. The 30th anniversary vinyl reissue has 5 bonus tracks. The digital version has 2 more. When Acid Mt. Fuji was originally released, the pressing presented some problems. No one in Japan at that point had cut a techno long-player before. As a consequence the results were a little shy of perfect. I have to say that 2024 remaster sounds amazing and the Youtube clips don’t do it justice at all. It’s almost like listening to two completely different albums. 

NOTES

1. “Ebi” was a pseudonym that Yokota adopted for the emotive trance he released on Berlin-based label, Space Teddy.
2. For more stories like this please check out Martyn Pepperell and Ken Hidaka’s excellent in-depth piece on Yokota, written for Wax Poetics in 2021. 
3. Yokota supported Glass in concert.
4. Weatherall was know to spin the odd bit of Yokota’s gear at his acid house / pagan rite night, Sabresonic.
5.  A respectful nod to Kris Needs techno column, in Echoes, of the same name.
6. Often these are, incredibly, edits of live jams.