Japan's darling (in my opinion)....Takako Minekawa

Takako Minekawa:

from the wikipedia article since I'm too lazy to come up with my own bio:

Background
As an accomplished all-around musician, Minekawa's musical skills set her firmly outside of the J-Pop tradition: she writes and composes most of her material, singing quirky lyrics about subjects such as clouds, cats, and the color white (her personal favorite), with her love of Kraftwerk and Music of France also showing through her unique experimental sound. She often makes use of vintage Casio keyboards and analog Moog synthesizers, as well as vocoders and other electronic instruments.

Her live debut was in 1990, calling herself Mamene Kirerie as a member of the group ''Fancy Face Groovy Name'' alongside Kahimi Karie and backed by Flipper's Guitar. She was also a member of the band L⇔R before releasing her solo debut, ''Chat Chat'' in 1994.

Although as a child Minekawa had a short acting career, this interest has not resurfaced in her adult life (aside from her voice exclaiming ''PlayStation!'' in a recent commercial for the product).

She has written professionally, as regular columnist in the Japanese edition of ''Keyboard'' Magazine; she also contributed a serialized novel to the Japanese quarterly ''Bungeishunjū Bungei''.

She married fellow musician Keigo Oyamada (aka Cornelius) in 2000. The pair have collaborated on several projects. Cornelius remixed some of her songs, including the well-received "Milk Rock". He also produced her album ''Fun9''.



Juan's verdict: She is indeed the queen of the Shibuya-kei sound (although Kahimi Karie is the empress). I remembered stumbling upon her music a few years ago back in high school by random. Don't know how I managed to find her by random but I did. It wasn't until last year that I discovered her song "Soft Grafitti" from the album "Fun9" on youtube. The song is just so beautiful and enchanting that it fits well with the video.

Anyway, finding a Takako Minekawa album is quite rare these days considering Emperor Norton records discontinued her releases. Thank god I was able to find it on Amoeba records on the used bin.

Here are three tracks to download:

Takako Minekawa - Plash
Takako Minekawa - Soft Grafitti
Takako Minekawa - Maxi On!