Shibuya-kei

This is not a sound, it's a shopping habit turned into records. Shibuya's record stores accounted for more than half of these acts' sales, and the music is what happens when a generation with money and import bins builds pop out of what it bought.

Ask what a Japanese band does with French yé-yé, Brazilian bossa, Burt Bacharach and a sampler, and you have the whole scene.

Tokyo, late 1980s into the 1990s. Two groups form the bedrock: Pizzicato Five, led by Yasuharu Konishi, and Flipper's Guitar, the duo of Kenji Ozawa and Keigo Oyamada, who started in British jangle and moved into sample-heavy work.

Flipper's were discovered by Zin Yoshida of Salon Music, who helped get them signed to Polystar in 1989. The term itself came from the press: the earliest known mainstream use was a November 1993 Apo magazine piece by Jiro Yamazaki, applied to acts charting on Oricon through sales at HMV Shibuya, Tower Records and Wave, who had no formal association and shared no common sound.

Labels followed: Oyamada founded Trattoria in 1992, platforming Venus Peter, Bridge and Kahimi Karie, alongside Konishi's Readymade and Crue-L. Matador and Grand Royal carried it to America mid-decade.

Who: Konishi and Maki Nomiya, Oyamada and Ozawa, Kahimi Karie, Takako Minekawa, Tomoyuki Tanaka; the shops on Shibuya's hills; Trattoria, Readymade, Crue-L, and later Escalator Records, run by Masashi Naka.

What: a cut-and-paste method drawing on 1960s yé-yé, lounge, bossa nova and sunshine pop, with artwork and videos pulling from British mod, Italian cinema, op-art and French new wave.

How a record gets in: the source material has to be foreign and specific, the arrangement has to be clean, the sleeve has to look designed before it looks played. Vocals sit light and close; the beat is usually borrowed.