A new DJ mix to capture the best of a vintage Nineties Japanese dance music sound. Think of it as retromania for retromania.

Thanks to the international success of Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Towa Tei, the loosely-defined, decade-spanning Nineties indie music movement known as Shibuya-kei has been one of Japan’s most influential cultural exports. The last fifteen years, however, have been unkind to the genre, as the movement’s originators abandoned its signature sound and pleaded for distance from the terminology. No one ever liked being pigeonholed under the dated term “Shibuya-kei” in the first place, but once the trend was over and its cachet depleted, artists wanted a chance to be themselves without all the SK-related baggage.

But here we are nearly 25 years after Shibuya-kei’s birth, and its eclecticism once again stands out on a global stage, this time as an antidote to the globalized factory-made pop monotony of the Twenty-Tens. Yet the musicians’ œuvres are partially buried under the sands of time, and knowledge of the genre’s hidden gems are locked in the heads of obsessive former young people (and in the bargain bins of provincial used record store dumps with pages on Yahoo! Auction). The time has been right for a new mix that showcases, celebrates, and reintroduces the best tracks from Shibuya-kei’s peak years. So here we are: The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One.

While many would identify 1993-1995 as Shibuya-kei’s shining moment in the sun — an era where Pizzicato Five’s “Sweet Soul Revue” and Kahimi Karie’s “Good Morning World” were pop chart hits — the genre crystallized as a dance music movement much later in the decade. “The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One” prioritizes beats over melodies, and the best beats popped up around 1998-2001 with the emergence of Readymade Records (Pizzicato Five, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Mansfield) and Escalator Records (Cubismo Grafico, Losfeld) as well as later followers in the 21st century such as Halfby. As a nod to deep connections to a wider international movement, the mix also includes a few key foreign artists who were either directly linked to the Shibuya-kei movement (Dimitri from Paris) or otherwise took heavy influence (Ursula 1000). Most dance music genres hover around a specific BPM range, but Shibuya-kei’s ravenous consumption of global rhythms stretches the tracks across the scale, from hip-hop to house to breakbeats all the way up to speedy bossa nova, samba, and drum’n’bass.

The mix, like Shibuya-kei itself, is designed to seamlessly flow through what otherwise would be disparate and discordant sounds. There are symphonic strings, jazz riffs, groovy bass lines, yé-yé rips, Hammond solos, digitally-degraded funk samples, vocoders, saxophones, MiniMoogs, turntable scratches, old-school rap toasts, bongos, acoustic guitar strums, a surprising amount of mambo, Lollapalooza melodies, dinky electro synths, jazz scat, schoolyard chants, whisper raps, Twilight Zone tones, Amen breaks, 909 hats, lyrical references to Jeremy Scott, and samples spanning from Scritti Politti, Sesso Matto, Bobby Valentín, and Buddy Rich, to Hair Goes Latin.

With so much freedom, maybe the better question is, what isn’t Shibuya-kei? The groups employed a punk D.I.Y. attitude but do not sound like “rock.” The electronic elements would never be confused with techno. Shibuya-kei is often “dumb” like Brighton big beat but too subtle and feminine to have been part of that boys club. The genre shares with trip-hop a love of rare samples but is bright and chipper in spirit. Artists dipped their toes into disco, Latin house, and downtempo but never fully subsumed the seriousness. The songs are too cartoonish and hyper to play in boutique hotel lobbies.

One clear thread is retro aesthetics — a love for the sounds of the past. Shibuya-kei was a hyperextension of sampling culture into the pop realm, whether actual stolen loops or simply perfect pastiche layered on top of elements alien to the original songs. The artists mostly looked to the 1960s but stole nearly anything from the past canon of independent music. Pizzicato Five always kept the horns and space-age bachelor pad sweeps but over time moved from house beats to drum’n’bass.

Another trait is the obsession with obscurity. Shibuya-kei artists seemed motivated to make music in order to further distinguish themselves from other music snobs. They worshipped the deepest cratedigging that never sampled or referenced sogs that could be heard accidentally as standard-issue background music. They listened to the Mondo Music catalog cover to cover. Compare them to inferior sub-Shibuya-kei groups in 1990s J-Pop like My Little Lover who took the production techniques but just sampled things we’ve all heard — Michael Jackson, Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles. Shibuya-kei, at its best, took all of its phrases from “musicians’ musicians” and LPs that would have otherwise been forgotten to the ages.

This love of discovery is perhaps the most attractive element of Shibuya-kei at the moment, when so many young creators — bored with the over-information of the Internet Age — no longer find allure in re-serving lost treasures from the past. So many artists are complacent to go again and again to the same soft-synth preset patches that sound exactly like the year in which we live (and somehow not that different from a decade ago). The specific sounds of 1990s Shibuya-kei can be thrown away but the genre possesses a potentially timeless methodology. There is magic born in a ruthless pursuit of rule-breaking beat-swapping, maniacal one-upsmanship. And this mix, The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One attempts to capture that sound.

Note for Trainspotters: I cut up and re-edited most of these tracks, some would say with great violence. For the song selection, there is a bit of overlap with some of the era’s best mixes (e.g. Spinout) but I prioritized lining up the most representative and highest quality songs rather than worrying that we’ve heard too much of Montparnasse’s “Hugo.” (Maybe we have, but there is a reason that song is on so many mixes.)

For more on the topic, read our six-part series, The Legacy of Shibuya-kei.

We are not doing an annual look back piece this year, because nothing really happened in Japan. But maybe that is what makes Japan so great right now.

There is much truth to the already clichéd global meme that 2016 was an awful year. But as the time came to put together our annual look-back piece, we came to the question, could the same thing be said about 2016 in Japan? And more generally, could anything be said about Japan at all?

Really, did anything that happened in Japan compare in scope to the Rise of Trumpistan, Brexit, unabated climate change, the non-stop deaths of musical pioneers and celebrities, terror attacks, and police shootings? SMAP breaking up was perhaps the “biggest story” and barely qualifies as news. “PPAP” is basically “Bottom Biting Bug” for a more net-savvy generation. So many things on the political side — the potential abdication of Emperor Akihito, Abenomics, South China Sea tensions — seem to be far from any point of resolution that would engender useful writing. There are optimistic movements towards women achieving greater participation in society and a larger role in the workforce, but it is too early to proclaim any kind of victory.

In the end, Japan had another flat year of slow incremental change (some in the right direction, some in the wrong), but compared to the rest of the planet, these events make for a very boring year-end roundup from a semi-defunct website.

Yet for the same reasons, living in Japan continues to be fantastic. Life is predictable. All the change is slow. In this year of tumultuousness, Japan was a sanctuary for continuity.

And people have noticed. Giant numbers are flocking to Japan, mostly as tourists, but if you read between the lines, Japan is quietly making it much, much easier to immigrate. In Tokyo, there are growing populations of non-Japanese people, and out in the countryside, the factory workers are increasingly non-Japanese. There are still significant barriers to true comfort for immigrants, especially from Asia, but Japan is internationalizing to a conspicuous degree.

So the thing that makes Japan more and more livable is making Japan less interesting for writing year-end roundups. Of course, the other problem is that we barely write on this site at all. We started Néojaponisme in 2007, a year when starting a site like this was obvious because the Internet was the bastion of reasonable, intelligent people who wrote reasonable, intelligent comments underneath long-form essays about serious topics. Néojaponisme rode on that early web utopian hope to collect together all the scattered people around the world interested in the depths of our particular niche. And then websites stopped being destinations, RSS fizzled out, and intelligent comment culture died.

The irony is that I’ve never felt more happy to live in Tokyo, and I remain excited to write about Japan. But all the pressures of life and work are moving us away from a “website” being the primary medium for our work. The truth is that I wrote 11,000 words this year specifically for Néojaponisme — but not for the web. We are working on something else, but I don’t want to reveal more about the project until we can guarantee it will happen. So here comes 2017, a year where, for us and for many, web silence does not equate to true silence.

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part five of a five-part series, covering the band’s final years and post-breakup releases.

Happy End of You (February 1998)
	A remix album that never came out in Japan, which perhaps explains the selection of foreign producers. This is mostly a time capsule of late 1990s IDM/electronica, but a few things hold up, namely The Automator and Saint Etienne’s respective remixes of “Love’s Theme” and some of the drum’n’bass. Dimitri from Paris’ “Contact” old school house is fun, but out of place. The rest is, in most cases, literally just noise.
(Cswee) — Taking the loungecore out of loungecore

Playboy Playgirl (October 1998)
	Here we begin the final, mature years of Pizzicato Five, a period in which the band finds a unique, yet timeless sound rooted in 1960s analog with the speed of late 1990s electronic music. The album starts with the excellent “La Dépression” — a cheery joke about Japan’s own economic despair. And then we get to Konishi’s great weakness in sequencing his own albums, forcing the least exciting song into the prime #2 spot; in this case, the boring “Rolls Royce” goes on for eight full minutes. The band recovers with “A New Song,” P5’s best use of the moog synthesizer in a bright and shiny Hugo Montenegro pastiche. Other interesting sound experiments include the mega-blown out mixes of “Weekend” and “The Great Invitations,” the Austin Powers trend convergence of “Playboy Playgirl,” and minimal stutter snare of “Such a Beautiful Girl Like You.” If you remove the skits, this is one of the more consistently good efforts and a sound for the ages.
(A) — The groovy, moogy Pizzicato Five we should all remember

Darlin′ of Discotheque e.p. (April 1999)
	Is there a more fitting symbol of Konishian excess than an eleven minute version of “Darlin’ of Discotheque”? Except, what if those eleven minutes were incredible? The sampled drum breaks, the foreboding strings, and a strong melody building slowly to justify the time spent? Other songs on this also pay off: “Barbie Dolls” is a classic, and “Tout Tout Ma Cherie” is the Michel Polnareff cover P5 was always poised to tackle.
(A-) — The hits keep coming all the way to the finish line

Nonstop to Tokyo e.p. (July 1999)
	A few months later, another EP. “Non-Stop to Tokyo” itself is one of the band’s weaker singles, and “Room Service” sounds too much like an early demo of “20th Century Girl.” The real treasure is “Bossa Nova 3003,” which like “Lesson 3003 (Part 1),” are canon-wide mashups where P5 took the Double Dee and Steinski model and applied it to themselves (a fitting act for a meta-band like Pizzicato Five.) “Mademoiselle” oddly sounds like Sweet Pizzicato Five era house act.
(B) — Interesting moments in otherwise excess

PIZZICATO FIVE (November 1999)
	This most certainly should have been the band’s swan song: P5 at its most mature, most adult. Konishi removed almost all explicit synth/dance music references for a relaxed, organic sound based on a treasure box of 1960s jazz and Yé-Yé samples. The result is as if Konishi took revenge upon Couples… and won! (There is even a superior Nomiya “cover” of “Serial Stories.”) “20th Century Girl” is a keeper, and I wish that “Goodbye Baby & Amen” would have been the band’s final musical moments. The American-release “Fifth Release from Matador” (note all the overflowing enthusiasm in that album title) is basically identical with some original versions of songs replacing Konishi’s odd remixes.
(A-) — What should have been P5’s final, grand statement

REMIXES 2000 (March 2000)
	As far as remix albums go, this one may be the strongest, with a gaggle of producers from Konishi’s own lineage: Mansfield, Cubismo Grafico, Comoestas, and Sunaga Tatsuo. There is no weird electronic violence, just Shibuya-kei on Shibuya-kei. Even Iwamura Manabu’s meta-jazz works on “Roma” better than his own work.
(B) — The sound of the Shibuya-kei dance pop peak

Voyage à Tokyo ep (September 2000)
	And so begins the end. Here we get You the Rock rapping over Pizzicato Five and a weird mashup on “Les Grandes Vacances.” This is not an important EP but at least holds up compared to the dreck that follows.
(B-) — The gruel gets thinner, with a hip-hop influence

Çà Et Là Du Japon (January 2001)
	This record is really, really, really, really terrible. Just complete dreck. I could maybe extract some good quotes from the lyrics of “Fashion People” (Nigo!) for a nonfiction book, and I am partial to the mambo-beats of 1960s cover “In America” but the rest is beyond cheesy — like a “JAPAN COOL” poster hanging in a provincial gift shop selling salty green tea. By taking Japan as a theme, Konishi produces a recursive error, like the scene where John Malkovich goes into his own head. Pizzicato Five throw all taste and class out the window and just go “Kimono” and “Sukiyaki Song” until you want to burn every album in their entire catalog. The only non-arguable bright side is the extension of Happy End’s throwaway “AIEUO” hiragana syllabary ditty into a fully fledged Disney symphonic song for the ages. An ignoble ending for the band, and probably not a coincidence that Nomiya Maki barely appears on the songs.
(D) — An Orientalist failure for masters of mukokuseki Internationalism

Pizzicato Five in the mix (December 2001)
	A DJ mix… claimed to be a “live” mix by Sunaga Tatsuo, but sounds computer-edited, and also, doesn’t really sound like a “live DJ mix.” The beginning hits on the house-y, club side of the band, but by the middle we’re on to the remarkably non-danceable “Triste” and a acoustic version of “The Night is Still Young.” For a band in constant need of editing, mixes can be a nice way to enjoy the catalog, but this one is overall unfocused and has no compelling narrative.
(C+) — Some random P5 songs in a random order.

pizzicato five I love you (March 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Pizzicato Five’s most mellow songs hand-picked by Konishi? Okay, I admit, I didn’t listen to this album. I confused it with the one below. But looking at the track list, this is a very strange selection from the catalog: drowsy songs that a very tired Konishi perhaps looked back fondly upon in his old age.
(C+) — Some random mellow P5 songs that Konishi happens to like

pizzicato five we love you (March 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Pizzicato Five’s most poppy songs? On first listen, I thought this was a waste of time. But as a Greatest Pop Hits — removing all of the band’s more experimental and dance oriented works — the songs shine through. The selection cuts out all the filler and reveals the band to have been masters of songcraft over a full decade.
(B+) — Nothing new, but a helpful distillation of the P5 pop sense

pizzicato five we dig you (May 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Japan’s DJs and producers mashing up the best of Pizzicato Five into a non-stop mega-mix in the vein of 2 Many DJs? Yes, please, that would be excellent. But that is not what this is. This is an hour of listening to your favorite three-second fragments of P5 songs linked up stochastically with very few moments of clever blending or recontextualization. Handsomeboy Technique schools everyone at the very end by making a song you actually want to listen to more than zero times.
(D) — The best Pizzicato songs mashed into formless oblivion

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part four of a five-part series, covering the band’s peak years with singer Nomiya Maki.

a television’s work shop e.p. (February 1994)
	By early 1994, Pizzicato Five was a hit band, so the only obvious thing to do was release an EP of Nomiya Maki learning pseudo-French and gathering up off-key children to sing their songs. (Bonus waste of time: Nomiya playing word games with said children for five-plus minutes.) The single asset on this otherwise skippable release is another chance to bathe in the peak Pizzicato Five sound and a decent alternative version of “The Night is Still Young.” The weird self-Orientalism of “Me, Japanese Boy” works better in English.
(C+) — Exclusively for completists with a high tolerance of children

Five By Five (August 1994)
	This was America’s official introduction to the hit Japanese band, Pizzicato Five. It is worth remembering that, at the time, the U.S. was solidly in the throws of post-Nirvana Alternative Nation and the only contemporary Japanese musicians known were Shonen Knife, The Boredoms, and perhaps, some noise acts if you hung out at Thurston Moore’s apartment. So from Pavement’s label Matador here comes a fashion runway, house-music obsessed lounge band with pixie vocals and a love of breakbeats. Most of the album is repeated on the full-length Made in USA but the weird self-Orientalism of “Me, Japanese Boy” is better in English.
(B) — An appropriate introduction, certainly strange for its time

Overdose (October 1994)
	Hot off the mega-hit “Sweet Soul Revue,” Konishi and co. stick to their successful formula — tight pop songs with a nod to the 1960s. The pakuri melodic and production thievery, however, becomes more pronounced, with explicit Donovan references in the high-energy “Airplane” and the harpsichord pizazz of “Shopping Bag.” And “Hippie Day” could not exist without the direct horn lift from “Soulful Strut.” Club beats show up on “If I were a Groupie” and an overly-long version of “The Night is Still Young,” and they go full hip-hop with some rap verses. While not as consistent as Bossa Nova 2001, the album still has many of the greats, such as “Happy Sad.” And yet, “On the Sunny Side of the Street” ended up being the most boring single of their entire career.
(A-) — Perfect 1960s pastiche but off in parts

Made in USA (October 1994)
	By all means, the American P5 releases should be non-canonical, but for an overly prolific band in need of editing, Made in the USA works to boil down Pizzicato Five to their essentials. Matador was also smart to leave a lot of the songs in Japanese, even though Nomiya handles the English well. (Their lyrics are equally simplistic in both tongues, if you’re wondering.) They made a mistake, however, in including the Japanese interview on “This Year’s Girl #2” (very misogynistic questions in hindsight.) “Catchy” is still boring, “Peace Music” is still amazing.
(A-) — The best of Pizzicato Five’s peak years

Romantique 96 (September 1995)
	Bossa Nova 2001, Overdose, and Romantique 96 work as a trilogy: song-oriented club pop with an emphasis on big melodies and 1960s references. The obsession moves over time slightly from New York and London towards Paris, but by this third installment, Konishi (no longer with K-Taro Takanami by his side) had run out of ideas. “Circus” is overly dependent upon a reference to “Sweet Soul Revue,” and there are many boring moments for a band who is rarely boring. On the other hand, there are many crucial tracks: the blend of 1960s strings and hip-hop on “Ice Cream Meltin’ Mellow,” the Platonic ideal of French bossa nova in “Nata DiMarzio,” the Kraftwerkian “Contact,” and the mature melancholy of “Triste.” The most famous song may be the cover of the Plastics’ “Good,” from which they remove the passive-aggressive tone of the original and turn it into a “Twiggy Twiggy”-esque groove track.
(B+) — The killer is killer, the filler is filler.

The Sound of Music
	Another good American compilation of the best tracks, with an English “Happy Sad” and the superior original version of “The Night is Still Young.” The LP has a strange inclusion of Saint Etienne’s interminable “Peace Music” noise loop. Rare track: the moody 1960s pop of “Fortune Cookie.”
(A-) — Another mid-career greatest hits

“Baby Portable Rock” (March 1996)
	One of the great P5 singles, and yet — a decent version does not appear on any of the albums. Admittedly, the song is a complete rip-off of Gary Lewis & The Playboys’ “Green Grass” but hey it’s ripped off very well.
(A-) — Great single that only loses points only for wholesale plagiarism

combinaison SPACIALE ep (June 1996)
	Insignificant but strong. Yoshinori Sunahara offers two abstract electronica remixes of “Ice Cream Meltin’ Mellow,” which may be more canonical than the original song. “Tokyo Mon Amour (Discotique 96 Mix)” is high-quality organ groove. For collectors, grab the EP, which came on 10” translucent green vinyl.
(B+) — Great cover, pretty good throwaway tracks.

Sister Freedom Tapes (June 1996)
	Of all the band’s many, many non-album releases, this may be the best. Sister Freedom Tapes sees Pizzicato Five loose in the studio as an actual 1960s rock band, without all the technology, covering “Airplane” as punk and The Beach Boys’ “Passing By” with freewheeling kazoo levity. Both “Snowflakes” and “To Our Children’s Children’s Children” are sweet in their simplicity. (The CD version also offers the self-parody “Cornflakes.”)
(A) — Songs shining in minimalist escape from their signature sound.

Great White Wonder (October 1996)
	After dozens of records, we’ve finally found it: the least consequential Pizzicato Five release. Bands with editing problems and too many songs on albums do not need compilations of rare tracks. The tracks on Great White Wonder are all either repetitive to other things, useless, or terrible.
(D-) — Forgotten songs for only the most heartless completists.

Happy End of the World (June 1997)
	If Romantique 96 was out of ideas, this is a revitalized Pizzicato Five: Happy End of the World is often considered the best P5 album of all. Konishi’s discovery of drum’n’bass gave him a new foundational principle for the final era of Pizzicato Five — speed. Specifically, jungle breaks, wacky drum solos, extremely exaggerated soul pushed beyond its natural tempo. This gives us a perfect blend of ultra-fast clicks and focused Sixties-inspired songs like “It’s a Beautiful Day.” From here we also get the Readymade label, for which this album is a template of 1960s-inspired 150-bpm+ sample-pop over breakbeats. And “Tokyo Mon Amour” anticipates the whiny Oriental melodies of Good Night Tokyo and Midnight Tokyo collections of actual 1960s club pop. “Porno 3003” is long and probably controversial among the fanbase but at least comes near the end.
(A+) — Futurism for crate diggers with crisp pop songwriting

Part Five: The Final Years 1998-2006

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part three of a five-part series, covering the band’s first releases with singer Nomiya Maki.

This Year’s Model e.p. (June 1991)
	“The Third” and near-final version of Pizzicato Five starts here with the addition of Portable Rock singer Nomiya Maki. In the band’s rebirth, P5 planned an ambitious schedule: releasing three EPs and an album over four months. This first EP is a slight let down in terms of musical content: it’s more a Maki manifesto. We get an overly long burst of spoken Japanese at a live show introducing the new version of the band, and then on “This Year’s Girl #1” a protracted interview with a scripted, infantilized Nomiya over hip-hop beats talking about her love of Betty Boop, Betsy Johnson, and school uniforms. (Also, who in the world asks the question, “What is the first thing you put in your mouth when you wake up?”) As for the actual songs: the fast jazz swing “Bridget Bardot TNT” feels a lot like old muddy-mix P5 with a new singer. There is an “Amen, My Brother” drum break hidden in there, however, and “Let’s Be Adult” has enough synth bass wobble, film samples, and club beats to give a clear sense of P5’s new direction. And yes, Nomiya is holding a Little Red Book on the cover (think Godard, not Mao).
(B-) — The introduction of a concept, without following through on proof

London Paris Tokyo e.p (July 1991)
	Another small step towards the Pizzicato Five we know and love. The EP starts with the band’s favorite “a new stereophonic sound spectacular” sample and subsequently descends into a sound collage complete with stereo-panned airplane noise. But then a small step backwards? “London-Paris” is punk-speed Public Image Limited with a vicious heavy metal guitar solo. And then “Tokyo’s Coolest Sound” actually is not Tokyo’s coolest sound at all — it’s generic dub reggae with delayed pianica (which they thankfully improve on the full-length version). “Past, Present, Future” is also guitar-based, and then we get the first long version of club pop “Thank You.”
(C+) — A new band with a new energy, but the wrong new direction

Readymade Recordings e.p. (August 1991)
	Of all the pre-album 1991 EPs, this pleasant live recording of the band may be the most “interesting” and least repetitive to later work. Lots of güiro in the laid-back jazz ensemble but also shockingly minimal in parts. “Lament No. 5” is the stand-out, with the hook stolen from “Comin’ Home Baby.” On the filler side: a poetry reading.
(B-) — Non-essential, but at least, different

This Year’s Girl (September 1991)
	This is the first true Pizzicato Five album — the classic sound, canonical songs — and a big step up in quality thanks to Nomiya Maki’s enormous presence. “I” (私のすべて) cleans out all instrumental sounds at the mid-range so that her voice floats to the very top. Both “Sankyu” and “Baby Love Child” start a successful formula of matching sweet melodies to club beats (in the latter case, the “Funky Drummer” break.) And then “Twiggy Twiggy” is the quintessential loungecore sound that almost no one ever did as well as Pizzicato Five: looped jazz drum samples and daintiness galore. In case you were not plenty entertained already, Konishi and co. also pull off one of the best ever Hosono Haruomi covers with the amped-up “Party.”
(A) — The album that truly marks the start of Pizzicatomania

Sweet Pizzicato Five (September 1992)
	Rule #1 in the P5 playbook is “always change,” so after a vocal-driven melodic pop album, Pizzicato Five needed to do something completely different. And the answer was, an album of house tracks. With “Flower Drum Song” and “Catchy,” these are not pop songs stretched out over TR-909 beats but abstracted musical passages made for the dance floor. The pace can be repetitive in parts, but there are a variety of emotions: “Telepathy” is sweet, “Shock Treatment” is sexy. “Kdd” is, however, unlistenable due to the sound of a ringing phone throughout. With every song going six to seven minutes, this is not the most pleasant Pizzicato Five effort, but it did expand their production palette for successes further down the line. Trivia: “Cosmic Blues” has a melodic reference to the Hosono song “Hurricane Dorothy” while “Catchy” seems to sample the soundtrack to Twin Peaks.
(B) — P5 goes New York house

Instant Replay (March 1993)
	In 1993, Pizzicato Five had a unique sound, a permanent singer, and a body of popular tunes — so it was time for a live album. For most of the songs, Nomiya sings over a cinematic parody of a hotel jazz band, which works well for “Twiggy Twiggy” and pre-canon “The Audrey Hepburn Complex.” They are also able to do some of the house songs with backtracks. Results are mixed. “Action Painting” oddly sounds less Pizzicato-like than in its Hosono-incarnation.
(B-) — A respectable lounge band with strong vocals and pleasant fans

Bossa Nova 2001 (June 1993)
	This is the moment when Pizzicato Five became a Japanese social phenomenon. With production from Oyamada Keigo, fresh out of his band Flipper’s Guitar, we have a strong set of 1960s, French, bossa nova influenced club pop songs with the perfect mix of live musicians, samples, and dance beats. Thanks to placement in a cosmetics ad, “Sweet Soul Revue” made the band into megastars. The song itself owes a lot to Sly & the Family Stone but adds a giant pop melody that sounds nothing like “Dance to the Music.” “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Peace Music” are perfect Beatles pastiches with a club beat. From a discographical standpoint, the main innovation here is a much stronger sequencing of non-overly long songs. There is filler towards the end, but the first 15 minutes of the album are nearly perfect. And “Hare Krishna” and “Playback 2001” are very good songs for the fact that they have been left out of the canon.
(A+) — The quintessential P5 sound, perfectly executed

Expo 2001 (November 1993)
	Remix albums are about taking (timeless) pop songs and making them fit the (timely) dance floor. They age poorly. This album has aged poorly.
(D) — House remixes and worse, unnecessary for the 21st century

Part Three: The Nomiya Maki Years 1994-1997