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Pizzicato Five: “Mini Cooper” (Freedom Sister Tapes, 1996)

“The lack of emphasis on originality and the obsession with details merged with the rampant consumerism of the great Japanese economic boom to produce a nineties musical movement unique to Japan […] collectively known as Shibuya-kei by the Japanese media. The term came from the Shibuya area of Tokyo, in which were clustered record stores like Tower and HMV that stocked a lot of imports, along with ultra-hip record boutiques. The upper middle-class, privately educated kids who frequented these stores bought loads of import records from the UK and esoteric reissues of all kinds, then created music that was a portrait of themselves as exquisitely discerning consumers.”

- Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, 2011