MUSIC

First re-issue album from the Skintone Edition Volume 1 Box Set

Magic Thread is Susumu Yokota’s deeply soothing and delicate debut release on the Skintone label. With a spartan palette of sounds and textures, Yokota taps into a fundamentally human need to fuse and connect disparate fibres, magically forming work which glistens and pulsates with life.

Magic Thread originally came out in 1998 as a limited-edition CD release of 500 copies. Initially intended for the Japanese market, it came without any artwork in a standard transparent CD case adorned only by a sticker containing essential album information and a quote:

‘Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.’ – Yokota, 1998.

First re-issue album from the Skintone Edition Volume 1 Box Set

Magic Thread is Susumu Yokota’s deeply soothing and delicate debut release on the Skintone label. With a spartan palette of sounds and textures, Yokota taps into a fundamentally human need to fuse and connect disparate fibres, magically forming work which glistens and pulsates with life.

Magic Thread originally came out in 1998 as a limited-edition CD release of 500 copies. Initially intended for the Japanese market, it came without any artwork in a standard transparent CD case adorned only by a sticker containing essential album information and a quote:

‘Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.’ – Yokota, 1998.

Low-key legend and occasional spar to everyone from Will Bankhead to Jamal Moss, Duster Valentine throws down a killer deep house meta-mixtape for YOUTH, hustled from myriad Chi-Detroit-NYC-Italian++ records - huge RIYL the OG’s.

Manc-Greek oracle Duster Valentine is the nom de plume of Paul Bennett, a heads-down but vital figure known for nudging disco, deep house and related strains of dance music since the ’80s (maybe longer, nobody knows), influencing everyone from Jon K to Christos Chondropoulos and Sockethead, with work deployed on a secretive, cult edit label and the likes of Berceuse Heroique and MAL.

For YOUTH, your man tends to a perennial touchstone - deep House - with over 90 minutes of cuts screwed and stitched with reeeel passion, parsing slivers of foundational tunes and reassembling them with additional pads and strings, into an eyes-down, pumping and swanging session judiciously tempered with dubwise digits on the mixer, plus a little post-production. It’s deadly stuff from top to bottom; obsessively methodical in its approach, effortless in its hypnotic traction and effect.

Numerous trax breeze by with a timeless guile that speaks to a lifetime immersed in the good stuff, with all his influences writ explicitly in the music and the j-card - dozens upon dozens of the artists whose drums, vox and stabs he cadged, pruned, and puckered. Like Paul himself, there’s no need to overstate it; it’s simply a masterclass, for the heads.