One of the great curiosities of the Japanese music scene is the tendency to eat up the latest indie rock innovations from the U.K. or U.S., leaving home-grown talent unknown and uncelebrated.

Since the early '80s, Zin Yoshida and Hitomi Takenaka, the duo known as Salon Music, have crafted an idiosyncratic body of work that stands with the best of overseas pop auteurs.

While the Shibuya hipsters are bouncing along to Creed, Limp Biskit or Cibo Matto, they're missing out on the beguiling mix on their latest release, "Round Five Shaggy Bee" (Trattoria), with its hints of the Fall-style beats and shouts, thick distorted guitars a la My Bloody Valentine and the fall-apart sweetness of the Velvet Underground. Once again, Salon Music have proved themselves masters of transforming sonic convulsions into lush, hook-laden pop songs.

"Basically we liked to experiment with music, but we don't want to end with an experiment. It tends to get boring. We want to plant our ideas in song structures. The idea was to end up within the song when we were done," explains Takenaka.

She coyly refuses to divulge her age, but like Kim Gordon, another mature musical siren, Takenaka has a sheer personal magnetism and earthy sexiness that has only ripened with time. Her partner, Yoshida, usually sports huge, face-covering sunglasses, a ploy, perhaps, to keep up with Takenaka who seems to have an innate flair for cool.

"Like a scientist" is how Takenaka describes him. If Yoshida is the mad experimenter (in his youth he was a fan of fringe sexual psychotherapist Wilhem Reich and the Dadaists), then Takenaka is his muse, the eccentric conceptualizer behind Salon Music's musical evolution.

"She looked like something out of the B-52s, always wearing long boots and vinyl coats which was rare in those days. She would come over to listen to records and be singing along happily then suddenly turn terribly blue. She'd bring me cookies then eat the whole box herself," says Yoshida describing their first meetings.

Hanging out led to making compilation tapes which begat various tape manipulations, and a stint in a friend's eight-track studio. Like many Japanese musical innovators of that era, Salon Music's tendency toward the unusual meant notice abroad preceded attention at home.

"Somehow one of our demo tapes ended up in London and actually made it onto a music chart. New Romantic producer David Claridge [Ultravox et. al] signed us to his label Mobile Suits, part of the Phonogram group, so our first release was actually overseas," says Yoshida.

They finally had a domestic release in 1983 on idol label Pony Canyon. ("We were their first real rock band," claims Yoshida.) Made partially as a soundtrack for a friend's film, "My Girl Friday," could be described as a rock record only at a stretch.

The novelty of Salon Music's records came in an era when, as Yoshida explains "most record company people had no knowledge of music. They didn't even know who Led Zeppelin or the Beatles were. Some would even admit that they didn't like music; they were just company employees. We even gave a lecture on rock history at one label."

This left the duo "always having to explain ourselves," says Takenaka, a situation that wouldn't change until a new wave of young musicians began swarming out of the small clubs in Shibuya and Shimokitazawa in the late '80s and early '90s.

If Shibuya-kei -- the combination of Pop Art and pop as art that has become the defining face of Japanese music overseas with the recent successes of Plastic Fantastic Machine, Cornelius and Takako Minekawa -- has a musical antecedent, it is Salon Music. Its defining tropes, the cut-and-paste scramble of musical inspirations that glide through genres, edgy, detailed design and an unironic fondness of kitsch, can be found first on many of Salon Music's albums.

The success of Shibuya-kei meant that the duo spent most of the early '90s producing other people. Many of the movement's most important albums from groups like Bridge (original home to teen-heartthrob Hideki Kaji), Original Love and Venus Peter come with Salon Music production credits. But it was Flipper's Guitar, the band that incubated Keigo Oyamada (Cornelius) and pop star Kenji Ozawa, that brought the greatest acclaim.

"People always said that Flipper's Guitar was a very manipulated band, that they approached each song with too many strategies, but actually, it was always very risky," remembers Yoshida. Even "Dr. Head's Tower," generally agreed to be Flipper's best work and the high point of Shibuya pop, was a seat-of-the-pants affair.

' 'Usually they made demo tapes before, but for 'Dr. Head's,' they couldn't come up with songs, so we booked studio time and began recording without them. They had a few samples with them, but nobody knew what sort of record it would become. During the last part of the recording session, it became a 24-hour campaign to finish the record."

Flipper's Guitar's success would, among other things, give Salon Music a permanent, comfortable musical home in the form of Oyamada's Trattoria label. Since 1995, they've been able to pursue their own musical direction in a relatively free environment.

"Mash," their first release on Trattoria in 1995, showed a shift from sample-driven work to something a bit harder.

"We were heavily into programming. Then I saw My Bloody Valentine and I thought 'guitar' and immediately went out and bought a Fender Jaguar. It was the first one I'd ever played," says Takenaka, explaining the group's gradual embrace of stronger rock sounds.

This trend, an almost indie psychedelia, continued on their next Trattoria release "Chew It in a Bite," and underlines "Round Five Shaggy Bee" too. But the new album is also a summing up, or rediscovery of Salon Music's early roots.

"On a recent compilation we did another version of a song that was on our first demo. We sort of rediscovered a lot of the music that we were listening to in those days -- the Feelies, the Fall, the Raincoats -- so maybe this record has a more back-to-basics feel to it," says Yoshida.

Back-to-basics for Salon Music is quite a different matter than for other bands. Suffice to say that amid the careening guitars lies the same keen musical curiosity that has kept Salon Music on the musical vanguard for more than a decade.