Expo follows Eve on Anchorsong's Ceremonial, and the sequencing is deliberate: where the opener establishes ceremony and space, this piece chooses velocity. Released in 2016 on Tru Thoughts, the second album by Tokyo-born, London-based producer Masaaki Yoshida marked a turn toward vintage African music, from Orchestre Poly-Rythmo to Afrobeat and highlife, without abandoning the crisp, live-sampled electronic language that had already earned support from Gilles Peterson, Huw Stephens, and Lauren Laverne. Expo became a single in its own right, and at just under three minutes it functions as the album's most immediate argument that celebration can be engineered as precisely as any minimalist beat.
What distinguishes the track within Anchorsong's catalogue is how completely it merges continents without pastiche. Yoshida built his reputation performing entirely live with an MPC2500 and keyboard, chasing the warmth and human connection he remembered from playing guitar in rock bands; here that method meets polyrhythmic insistence borrowed from records such as The Vodoun Effect. The result is not world-music tourism but a producer's honest response to discovery: bass and percussion lock into a forward motion that feels both contemporary and decades old, while melodic fragments flicker across the top like light on brass.
Within Ceremonial, Expo sits among longer meditations such as Last Feast and Butterflies, yet it may be the record's clearest thesis statement. The album title and artwork nod to ritual and attire, and Yoshida has spoken about African music's ability to sound cheerful even when life is hard; Expo distills that idea into something almost pop in its brevity. It does not explain the record's ambitions so much as demonstrate them, proving that Anchorsong could absorb new influences without losing the immersive arrangements that defined Chapters and the Mawa EP.
For listeners who encountered Yoshida through Boiler Room sets or headline nights supporting Bonobo and DJ Krush, the track remains a favourite entry point into his Afro-electronic phase. The production stays dry and tactile, every hit placed with the care of someone who still thinks in terms of live performance rather than static files. That physicality is what keeps Expo from sounding like a genre exercise; it feels played, even when it is sampled into existence.
By its close, Expo has done the work of an overture in miniature. Anchorsong leaves the listener inside Ceremonial's wider ceremony, but with momentum restored and curiosity sharpened. A decade on, the song still answers the question Yoshida posed with the album: what happens when a minimalist electronic artist falls in love with African rhythm and refuses to treat that love as decoration. The answer is this burst of motion, precise, joyous, and unmistakably his.
