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Some of Japan's most exciting music these days is being created by a group of kids in their twenties who grew up playing Nintendo and listening to bands like Pizzicato Five and Flipper's Guitar. The music is semi-jokingly called pico pico pop, "piko piko" being a Japanese onomatopoeia for beepy computer sounds, which the musicians generate with synthesizers and use as building blocks for their neo-techno compositions.
The main groups, with names like Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, Sonic Coaster Pop, YMCK, and Macdonald Duck Eclair, usually feature female vocalists singing above the bleep-bleeps in a soft, whispery voice à la French pop. This is the kind of jazzy pop Super Mario might listen to while on break from dodging sliding turtle shells and killer mushrooms.
Cornelius
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The musicians behind the pico pico movement came of age in a glorious time for Japanese music: the so-called Shibuya-kei era in the late '90s. (Shibuya is the trendy district in Tokyo full of record stores, clubs, and youth fashion boutiques.) Units like Flipper's Guitar and Cornelius, Pizzicato Five, and Cibo Matto made Tokyo an international music hotspot with their new music, fusing styles like lounge, jazz, bossa nova, and pop. By the start of the 21st century, the Shibuya-kei movement had fizzled, but its influence lives on, and the pico pico kids are its cultural heirs.
The Aprils, photo by Ken M
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The nerve center of the pico pico pop scene is the independent label Usagi-Chang Records (translation: "Little Bunny Records"), which has released albums by the main pico practitioners, including YMCK and Sonic Coaster Pop. Events thrown by Usagi-Chang are parties of like-minded, fashion-loving guys and gals who happily dance along to the songs, in contrast to typical Tokyo rock shows, where the self-conscious audiences stand still, or at most bob their heads a bit to the music. At pico events, the visuals are as important as the sound — for example, a group called the Aprils screens computer-graphic videos tailored for each song during their shows, and, at the climax, brings a dancing aqua and white panda onstage. Everything is about celebration and fun — pico pico is the polar opposite of emo.
Until recently, I wasn't a big pico pico fan. I found all the beep-beeps annoying, and didn't think the music had much heart. That all changed when I listened to a song called "Clarion" by Macdonald Duck Eclair on a compilation album released by K.O.G.A. Records, a Tokyo independent label famous for its hard-rocking girl bands. Macdonald Duck Eclair is one of the bands that's always mentioned in lists of pico pico bands, but the trio's song "Clarion"
was really more rock than techno or electro-pop, something more to my liking. I went out and bought their two albums, short short and The Genesis Songbook, and soon found myself hooked on their sound, a combination of repetitive, often harsh-sounding synth-pop and soft female vocals. It's a strange pairing, but it works, and moreover it was a sound I'd never heard before. From there, I tried out other pico picos, and found I dug most of it.
Now I even like YMCK, a unit at the furthest extreme of the scale of pico pico-ness. Unlike other bands that use guitars and other traditional rock instruments or sampled sounds, YMCK crafts its music almost exclusively from Nintendo-like, beepy computer noises and female vocals. Yet with this limited palette of sounds, it creates tunes that remind you of '50s jazz — in one song even doing a variation on John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," demonstrating that sometimes old is new and new is old.
Posted November 2006
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