Shugo Tokumaru is one of those unfairly talented types who seem to be able to turn their hand to anything. He wrote, played and sang every note on his two albums of "bedroom music" and produced them both too. The 25-year-old also finds time to play guitar and occasionally sing in lo-fi indie pop band The Gellers.
But Tokumaru's talents do not extend to describing his own music. Cornered in a Shinjuku dressing room backstage, the boyish-looking songwriter admits, "I'm asked to describe my music a lot, but I find it a difficult question to answer. I don't know how to describe it."
Plenty of others have tried, categorizing his music variously as "folk," "folktronic," "electronica" and "indie-pop," among other labels. The promotional sticker on Tokumaru's debut album, "Night Piece," released in Japan in August 2004, helpfully described the 25 minutes of music as "chamber pop."