Susumu Yokota ‎– Sakura

Rhodes/Wurlitzer piano sounds cover this album like a fresh snowfall over Mt. Fuji; restrained, reverberated drum machines count regular time, and other-worldly vocal samples interject tastefully - these too soaked in dreamy delays. Yokota's subtle jazz colouring on strangely rational and listenable progressions are the real star on the album. Mixed loudly and centered confidently, the music paints its pictures with this broad brush, while phasing drums sporadically syncopate across the aural landscape.

It has an east-meets-west sound, and not all the tracks take-off to Yokota's often achieved cloudy and surreal aural ink-paintings, but those that do work wonderfully. Some tracks create a busy tension that never resolves, others sit much sounder with a fuller, more transcending sound (you could play this album to recruit cult members, I'm sure), but it is the more traditional neo-jazz tracks (of which there are two) that sing the loudest for this listener. It's not quite the lo-fi experiment as often quoted, but it is surely respectable, gentle, soothing and often surreal.