Mention the word "art" to the average Japanese pop musician and the response is likely to be a roll of the eyes, a sharp intake of breath and a lot of mumbling.

This isn't to say that the Japanese pop scene doesn't have loads of groundbreaking artists. Cornelius, DJ Krush and Buffalo Daughter, to name a few, have produced releases that push pop and hip hop into uncharted territories and qualify them as more than just a youth culture commodity. It's just that modesty or, more likely, a painful sensitivity to street cred keep most of them from saying so.

Self-portrait of Takuji Aoyagi, a member of Little Creatures who has also channeled his creativity into film and poetry.

Takuji Aoyagi is refreshingly capable of such a confession, and luckily, he has the talent to make it more than just pretense.

As one-third of Little Creatures, Aoyagi has been instrumental in the renaissance of listenable, independent pop music in Tokyo. Through his spoken-word events, he has rescued poetry from the stuffiness of academia and infused it with a subcultural hipness that recalls the Beats.

He has taken up acting too, starring in the independent feature "Timeless Melody," a fixture on last year's film festival circuit, and more recently produced a documentary of his poetry readings and starred in the short feature "Raft."

"It isn't me trying to do this or that," he says of his decidedly artistic endeavors, "but as person who is already doing it or right in the midst of doing it."

A friend dubbed him Kama Aina, "islander" in Hawaiian. It's a nickname that suits him and not just because of his laid-back, easily approachable manner.

On the latest Little Creature's EP, "Chordiary," Goldie's drum 'n' bass classic, "Inner City Life," is recomposed with lush orchestral strings, and a lazy, almost Mexican-style guitar. Although a group effort, the track epitomizes what makes Aoyagi interesting. Just as islands are places where different cultures meet and mix, so Aoyagi has mastered the fusion of disparate elements into a seamless, unique whole. He has since adopted the name for his solo projects.

"When I looked at my CD and record shelves, I discovered that what I had most of was island music," he says, "and I felt that this was the music that spoke to me personally. In the several groups in which I play, there are parts of me that I couldn't express fully and that is what I wanted to do under this name."

The latest release, "Kati," blurs the lines between Aoyagi the musician and Aoyagi the film buff and occasional actor.

All the songs on the album, originally recorded three years ago as a give-away cassette with the hip culture and club magazine Dictionary, have been named after indie actresses: Thus "Ana Torrent" is followed by "Yelle Rottelander," "Karen Mok" and "Gena Rowlands."

"Last year I was really occupied with film," he explains. "For me what made the biggest impression were good actresses. None of the tracks originally had titles. When I made each piece it wasn't as though I had a certain actress in mind; it just happened that the number of actresses that struck me matched the number of songs that needed a title."

The debt to film isn't limited to song titles, however. Aoyagi has scored both film and dance pieces and the songs on "Kati" have the flat, planar quality of background music. Guitar motifs wander between tracks and the songs are full of incidental sounds, as if there is activity going on just outside the limits of hearing.

In other hands, the effect might be boring and repetitious, but Aoyagi is an adept stylist with enough of a pop sensibility to render his pieces soothing rather than soporific. The resemblance to Brian Eno's "Music for Films" isn't a coincidence.

"The process of creating this music was very similar to the way one works with film, particularly indie film," he says, "especially in the way people work in small numbers in a very guerrilla way. I carried a hard disk recorder and like filming on location, I gathered sound on location."

Most of the instrumental tracks were recorded on-site too with an eye toward imbuing even these with the essence of place and circumstance.

"On the second track, 'Yelle Rottelander,' I went to three different cafes," says Aoyagi. "At one, they let me go into the kitchen and I set up a mike above the cook and I recorded there. At another, I set up a mike next to the cashier. The last place was a jazz kissa. I edited it into one track to make a sort of imaginary sonic cafe."

It is this sort of subtle experimentation that makes Aoyagi both challenging and approachable. Aoyagi has managed to be an actor, composer and pop star within the confines, or lack thereof, of the independent scene. Unlike other media centers, Tokyo has few artists along the lines of rock group Yo La Tengo or filmmaker Hal Hartley who have managed to shape long-lived careers almost entirely outside the mainstream. Aoyagi is one of the very few.

"In finding things that one likes or that one selects like food that you like or clothes or friends, I'm approaching things from the same angle, even if the various genres or fields are different. My angle doesn't really lead to a mainstream sort of thing," he says.

"I feel drawn to a certain kind of unfinished, rough quality, things that still have an opening, a sense of being incomplete. I find that sort of thing compelling. And I seem to find people's emotions or feelings surfacing from that certain place."