Pizzicato Five and the Shibuya-kei Sound

Everything about Japan is a condensed version of what happens in other cultures. Tokyo is a city of cities, equal parts Manhattan, Las Vegas, Paris and Hong Kong. The country villages are like a bullion of provincial charm. And as for Japanese pop culture, it too operates on a much more intense, insular level than its counterparts in the West. Take the music scene in Japan in the 1990's, for instance. It was a sort of artistic renaissance in every sense of the word. Not only was there a boom in the number of unique artists in the recording studios of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Sapporo, there was also a refreshingly international flavor to the clear influences of the artists. For the first time in the history of pop music, Japanese artists made a splash beyond their own borders.

Of all the musical acts to come out of Japan in the 90's, none was as widely loved as The Pizzicato Five. This Hokkaido-based group had a very rocky start in the mid 1980's, recording no fewer than four major flops in the space of six years. P5's lineup changed around so many times that it made The Cure look stable. It wasn't until an up-and-coming solo singer named Maki Nomiya stepped in as the lead singer that the Pizzicato Five (then reduced to just three performers, Nomiya, Keitaro Takanami and Yasuharu Konishi) that the band saw any commercial momentum.

This Year's Girl, the 1991 album featuring P5's first hit, "Twiggy Twiggy", introduced the band to the world after a half decade of growing pains. It would take another three years for the Pizzicato Five to get much notice in the United States, but by then they were already a significant part of the Japanese music scene. They're considered one of the pioneering bands in the Shibuya-kei style, a slick fusion of international jazz and sample-heavy electronic music that is at once retro and forward-thinking.

The most prominent influence to the star-making sound on This Year's Girl is the French Ye-Ye scene of the 1960's. For a period of time, everything that songwriter Serge Gainsbourg touched turned to pop music gold, and I suppose that's indirectly true for the Pizzicato Five. By combining 60's hipster sounds, savvy American hip hop and a stylish but straight-faced Japanese sensibility, the band cemented Japan's place in the pantheon of serious music.

A string of hits and a TV theme song later, Pizzicato Five hooked up with producer Cornelius for Bossa Nova 2001 and the circle of the Japanese music scene was complete. Cornelius is among some of the most talented producers to come out of Japan in the past twenty years. He deepened the band's sound with his trademark lush layering and wistful sense of beauty. With Cornelius, P5 sounds like the halfway point between Beck and Air.

The period between 1995 and the band's breakup in 2001 saw the ever-dwindling lineup jetting around the world and recording non-stop. They hit big in Europe just after Keitaro Takanami, the last founding member, left and they signed with Matador Records for most of their US releases. Stateside completists have to do a fair amount of importing to get P5's full discography these days, but the Internet has made that considerably easier than it was in the band's heyday.

If The Pizzicato Five and the Shibuya-kei movement can teach us anything, it's that the synthesis of disparate cultural ideas can occasionally create some amazing art. Few pop groups of the 90's were as truly international in spirit as P5 and it served them, and us listeners, rather well.