Even as a young person making music for other young people to dance to, Susumu Yokota was fascinated by death. On the sleeve of his 1998 album Image 1983 – 1998, he wrote, “I wished to be kona”—a Japanese word meaning “powder,” “dust,” or “flour”—“at the moment of death.” Gather a handful of powder and blow on it, he wrote, and the particles will never come together in the same way again—a metaphor, perhaps, for reincarnation. “It is atmosphere that I’m interested in,” he told The Wire the following year, attempting to describe the increasingly amorphous electronic music he’d begun releasing on his new label, Skintone. “It’s like powder. Abstract. Free. One breath—pffff—and it’s gone.”

Yokota’s work was not always so atmospheric. A graphic designer and self-taught musician, he gravitated first to moody post-punk bands like Joy Division, Durutti Column, and Young Marble Giants, but by the early 1990s, as acid house hit Japan, he threw himself into dance music with gusto. Between 1992 and 1997, he released some 30 records under a dozen different aliases, all of them bursting with the supersaturated colors and vivid shapes of the techno revolution.

There was the acid trance of 1993’s The Frankfurt-Tokyo Connection, for Sven Väth’s Harthouse label, and 1994’s similarly psychedelic Acid Mt. Fuji, for Japan’s Sublime; there were the bleepy, Detroit-inspired sounds of his 246 project and the jazz-tinged breakbeat whimsy of 1996’s Cat, Mouse and Me. But in 1998, a fissure appeared in Yokota’s work. While he would continue to release jazzy deep house on albums like 1998, 1999, and Zero, he was privately becoming interested in a homespun interpretation of ambient music. Frustrated with the music industry and souring on club culture, he founded Skintone, named after a deep-house party in the Ebisu district he co-ran with Alex From Tokyo, as an outlet for his more idiosyncratic output; between 1998 and 2012, he would release 14 albums on the imprint.

Yokota died in 2015, at age 54. And while his music is hardly unknown—unlike his ambient predecessor Hiroshi Yoshimura, his work was always available in the West, thanks to licensing deals with UK labels Leaf and Lo Recordings—his profile has faded in the decade since his death, though his music sounds as timely now as ever, if not more so. A lavish new box set gathers his first seven Skintone albums (volume two is due next year), offering the chance to reconsider the work of this one-of-a-kind visionary.

Yokota’s first Skintone album, 1998’s Magic Thread, is a record of two minds, alternating between atmospheric soundscaping and elliptical, minimalist house. What the two facets share in common is their unusual sound design, seemingly sourced from found objects—like the rattle of gears in “Spool” or what might be a finger dialing a rotary telephone in “Unravel”—and the ambient hum of the city. In his youth, Yokota fashioned sound-making devices out of items rummaged from his father’s workshop; Magic Thread suggests a collection of sculptures cobbled together out of bent paper clips, lumps of clay, and torn paper bags.

The loop is the organizing principle of both the beat-driven and the abstract tracks, but unlike the clean lines and quantized pulses of sequencers, Magic Thread’s sample-based assemblages wobble and warp in suggestively hypnotic ways. There are no precedents for the album’s unstable fusion of styles in Yokota’s catalog—and few, in fact, anywhere else in the electronic music of the 1990s. Unlike the warm, wooly ambient house of the KLF and the Orb, Yokota’s take on the style is a moodier, more idiosyncratic affair, spiritually aligned with the lumbering beats that Matthew Herbert and Dettinger were beginning to explore around the same time, half a world away.

Released later the same year, Image 1983 – 1998 marked an even cleaner break with Yokota’s club music. The first tracks date to 1983-84, when Yokota was in his early 20s. “Kaiten Mokuba” and “Fukuru No Yume” sound like experiments in fairground concrète, organs slipping in disorienting circles; the pensive guitar of “Tayutafu” suggests kinship with Nick Drake, whose Fruit Tree box set had been released just a few years prior, while the processed guitar of “Wani Natte” reveals his affinity for Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly. No obvious gap separates those early sketches with the late-’90s pieces that comprise the rest of the record; the latter just feel fuller and more immersively atmospheric, evidence of Yokota’s increasingly assured vision.

The instrumentation—guitar, piano, organ, even harmonica—heralds what, within a few years, would be known as “folktronica,” but the foggy loops and murky layers lend a dreaminess distinct from the more vivid sounds that Four Tet would soon begin making. “Yumekui Kobito” punctuates brittle piano and chimes with a cryptic, almost inaudible sigh, like a pause-button edit of a Saturday-morning cartoon; “Morino Gakudan” sounds like an attempt to recreate a half-remembered Steve Reich piece; the blurry organs and lilting coos of “Enogu” show the influence of Yokota’s Kankyō Ongaku predecessor Hiroshi Yoshimura. The standout is “Kawano Hotorino Kinoshitade,” which pairs a high, lonesome vocal loop reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II with buoyant layers of Rhodes electric piano—a minimalist gem whose simplicity belies its depth of feeling.

In 1999, Yokota released Sakura, widely considered his masterpiece. Slower and more spacious, it feels like a distillation of the ambient experiments of Magic Thread and Image 1983 – 1998. Rhodes keys swim in reverb and tremolo, echoing the stillness of Yoshimura’s GREEN and Music for Nine Postcards; mournful harp and string melodies hark back to Japanese folk; wordless, keening vocals, a Yokota trademark, lend a mournful undercurrent. Despite the pensive mood, Sakura—named after the cherry blossoms seen in Japanese culture as symbols of transience and renewal—throws out the occasional curveball: The glistening ambient techno of “Genshi” prefaces the sound the Field would take up in the mid 2000s, while “Naminote” flips a rolling Chick Corea sample into dubbed-out deep house. For some, these shifts in tone might prove distracting, but I think they speak to what made Yokota special: He stubbornly refused to acknowledge barriers between his disparate interests.

He would emphasize the breadth of his range in 2001, releasing two albums diametrically opposed in style. Grinning Cat, constructed largely out of layers of piano, floats between ambient and downbeat; the mood is rosier than on Sakura, reflecting Yokota’s newfound domestic bliss with his girlfriend and her three cats. (“The everyday life with cats is like a fairytale,” he wrote at the time.) Crisp, carefully carved breakbeats assume a more prominent role on tracks like “King Dragonfly” and the Massive Attack-like “Flying Cat,” but you can also sense his collages getting spongier and more dissonant, marked by unconventional blends and unexpected shifts. Will, released later that year, might as well be the work of a completely different artist: nine tracks of jazzy, Latin-tinged deep house indebted to artists like Pal Joey and Masters at Work, and far more in keeping with his non-Skintone releases from the period, like 2000’s Zero. Yet while Grinning Cat and Will couldn’t be more different stylistically, both sound like expressions of the deepest kind of bliss, one private and the other communal.

The complexity of emotion was on Yokota’s mind in these years. “I’m trying to achieve that beautiful thing,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “There is always fear, rage, and ugliness existing behind beauty,” he said, explaining that his goal was to express ki-do-ai-raku—joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness; a shorthand phrase for the full range of human emotions—in his music. He came closest on 2002’s The Boy and the Tree and 2003’s Laputa, the final two albums collected in Skintone Edition Volume 1. Structurally, they represent a return to the exploratory sample play of Sakura and Grinning Cat, but there’s a newfound mystery in their movements, a sense that Yokota is feeling his way toward ideas that even he doesn’t quite understand.

Inspired by a visit to Yakushima Island’s Unsuikyo Ravine—the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and home to the Jomon Sugi, a cedar tree estimated to be as many as 7,000 years old—The Boy and the Tree is part forest bathing, part plunderphonic immersion in Yokota’s record collection. Its 12 deeply psychedelic tracks fold together birdsong, chanting, raga, gamelan, flute, marimba, zither, revving motorcycles, and hand percussion. The ambient tracks take shape like drops of ink spreading through water; the rhythmic ones eschew conventional drum programming for scraps of percussion and stringed instruments from around the world, weaving them into pulsing throughlines that bring order to the gentle chaos of his flyaway sounds.

If The Boy and the Tree is Yokota at his most satisfyingly complex, 2003’s Laputa shows him at his most bewildering. The album’s 15 tracks—some just a minute or two long, and none reaching five—unfold like dreams, or landscapes blurring past the window of a speeding train. Even the best ambient music can be difficult to recall in detail once it has finished playing, but in the case of Laputa, you may have difficulty remembering how a given track even began. “Rising Sun” is a swirl of birdsong, drones, cowboy guitar, ring-modulated gurgling, and what sounds like a scrap of operatic aria lifted from a scratchy 78; “Gong Gong Gong” collages together gongs, pedal steel, and nonsensical spoken-word; “Lost Ring” superimposes ECM-grade ambience with Blade Runner-esque noir saxophone and, briefly and bizarrely, a perky splash of bluesy Hammond organ. The mood throughout is sometimes beatific, sometimes druggily disturbing. I’m frequently reminded of Philip Jeck’s slowed-down vinyl excavations; a ghostly quality hangs over every track and every sample, as though Yokota were seeking to contact spirits. The spectral “Trip Eden”—a liquid soundscape of moaning voices and shivery close harmonies—might be the most harrowing thing he ever recorded.

Seven albums can be a lot to absorb from any artist; all the more so when they entail such jarring shifts in mood—like Will—or require such focused, emotionally engaged listening, like Laputa. But Yokota benefits from the box-set treatment. To immerse yourself in his work is to be reminded of its uncommon depth, and to realize how intricately it’s all connected. The abject mourning of “Trip Eden,” the insouciance of “King Dragonfly,” the bliss of “Hagoromo”—they are all facets of Yokota’s pursuit of a totalizing picture of human emotion. In the original liner notes to Image 1983 – 1998, Yokota looked back on his years obsessed with dance music with alarm and regret. “My life became techno,” he wrote. “From morning until evening, rhythms were repetitively ticked off while sleeping, and fractal images were the only reflection I saw…. I was slipping into the memories of the future. After awakening from this mind-control, I started to seek and get inspiration from reality and everyday life; the food I eat, cats from my neighbourhood, and most of all, how I live.” These seven albums make clear how profoundly Yokota was able to translate his quotidian reality to tape, resulting in some of the most original and idiosyncratic ambient music of its era. Skintone Edition Volume 1 is a moving portrait of a life lived in sound.