Twenty years ago the Shibuya-kei music scene was in full swing. The charts were filled with some of the most daring, artistic pop music this country had ever heard, courtesy of artists such as Cornelius, Pizzicato Five, Original Love and Kahimi Karie.
Among these musicians was Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus, who left the ruins of his native Scotland's post-punk scene for the vibrant life of Shibuya-kei, which reinvented Japanese pop as a cultured realm of literate, postmodern music that drew inspiration from an astonishingly wide variety of obscure sources.
Before the rise of Shibuya-kei, it would have been almost unthinkable for a song like the Momus-produced Karie single "Good Morning World" to top the Oricon rankings — a track that married lyrical references to The Fall's Mark E. Smith and French singer-songwriter Jacques Dutronc to musical backing sampled from cult prog-rock group Soft Machine — but that's exactly what happened in October 1995.