East meets west with Shibuya-kei taking center stage in the mod world this week. Shibuya-kei was a 1990s music movement that wasn't about Tokyo's ultra-trendy and fashionable Shibuya district as it was about a rather lucky gathering of Japanese musicians who mixed bossa nova, soul, funk, jazz, techno and synthpop into a retro-futrist sound that was redundant yet fresh.

Shibuya-kei's most prominent artists -- Flipper's Guitar, Pizzicato 5, Love Tamborines, Kahimi Karie, Fantastic Plastic Machine and others -- mixed together everything from sixties pop and motown, to acid jazz, krautrock, French ye-ye and twee. The result was something like if Sergio Mendes and Burt Bacharach had a Japanese love child.

So this week I'm exploring the soul and style of Shibuya-kei and also exploring a few of the scenes influences, as well as some of it's offspring and distant cousins.

Be sure to head over to the modcast homepage at http://www.mistersuave.com/2012/12/modcast-253-east-meets-west-with.html for a complete track list, links to band sites, and some really cool Shibuya related videos.

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