Shibuya-kei

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Shibuya-kei (Japanese: 渋谷系; lit. "Shibuya style", also called the Shibuya sound) is a Japanese music subculture and microgenre that originated in Tokyo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It began as an indie scene encompassing pop musicians who incorporated disparate Western influences, drawing especially from 1960s pop, indie pop, and rare grooves. The term mainly refers to the shared artistic sensibilities between these musicians, who were typically dissimilar in sound, employed quotation and sampling extensively, and were inspired by earlier genres that used kitsch, fusion, and artifice. Coinciding with the Japanese asset price bubble and emergence of J-pop, the term was originally applied around 1993 to acts whose record sales were largely driven by affluent youth in Tokyo's Shibuya ward, which hosted shops with an exceptional stock of out-of-print imports from the West. Led by Flipper's Guitar and Pizzicato Five, acts frequently collaborated within the scene and, in their music videos...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Nicholas Wang from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY-SA 2.0