Shibuya-kei

Shibuya-kei is most definable by its difficulty in pinning down its hallmarks. It’s retro-futurist, yet doesn’t agree on a past or a future it should most resemble. It’s a confluence of styles — Brazilian bossa nova, dub reggae, ’60s psych and folk rock, American hip-hop, French chanson, and more — but rarely do all these influences appear at once, or in predictable permutations. As an active art movement, it lasted a relatively short period from the late ’80s through the ’90s, yet left an indelible mark on the landscape of Japanese pop. It’s hard to define because its epicenter, the Shibuya ward of Tokyo known for its high concentration of trendy culture, fashion and nightlife, was in a state of rapid flux. Cultural imports from all over the world collided at the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing, boosted by a booming Japanese economy and abundance of new music making tools like synths and samplers.

A group of like-minded working artists stood ready to capitalize on this unique moment of cultural exchange, immersing themselves in aesthetics new and old, cutting and pasting with freewheeling whimsy. The earliest Shibuya-kei records, like Flipper’s Guitar’s 1991 masterpiece Doctor’s Head World Tower, were a gentle-on ramp into what would become a maximalist style. Influenced by the Madchester movement of late ’80s England, the band — previously a group of five but by their third album whittled down to the duo of Kenji Ozawa and Keigo Oyamada — built upon their chirpy indie pop sound with sampling of Madchester beats and interpolations of Beach Boys tunes. By the tail end of the decade, Oyamada had struck out solo under the name Cornelius and pushed the approach to its limit, creating what many consider the definitive Shibuya-kei statement with 1997’s Fantasma. Live instrumentation swirled into a mix of collaging, resulting in a dizzying montage of sound that whips the listener around to every corner of Oyamada’s frenetic mind. The throughline from Flipper’s Guitar was identifiable, but a few years made worlds of difference.

Elsewhere in Tokyo’s special ward, groups like Pizzicato Five were taking a different tack. Similar to Flipper’s Guitar, they started off as a larger group before peeling away to the core duo of veteran DJ and producer Yasuharu Konishi and vocalist Maki Nomiya. As they went through constant personnel changes they reinvented themselves from album to album, flirting with loungey bossa nova, blistering breakbeat, and laid-back scores for variety television. They released nearly a dozen albums from their inception to 1997, rolling up all their sonic experiments into the incredibly dense Happy End of the World. It seemed appropriate for their most fully realized project to also be their global breakout, releasing in the United States via Matador Records following the international success of their compilation of previous material, cheekily titled Made in USA. Pizzicato Five would ultimately become one of Japan’s most popular musical exports and act as ambassadors for Shibuya’s signature sound.

Shibuya-kei had more or less run out of steam by the early oughts, though not because its architects had run out of juice. They simply moved on to other things, fanning out from Shibuya and following new fascinations. Rather than a coordinated movement, Shibuya-kei was a moment in time and a reflection of global culture converging in one spot. In essence: you had to be there.

Shy Clara Thompson