Now available in our store: The hushed, luminous return from the Japanese experimental pop icon, now available on vinyl with beautiful packaging and artwork by Ippei Matsui.

You’ve heard Takako Minekawa’s voice, even if you don’t know her name. For more than two decades, that’s been her softly chiming “PlayStation” in Sony’s global ads for the gaming console. The syllables land with that weightless, breathy clarity that has been her quiet signature for three decades now, a sound that feels both childlike and unnervingly precise. For a lot of listeners outside Japan, that tiny corporate whisper is the closest they have ever come to her, which is funny and a little sad, given how much stranger and more beautiful her actual body of work is.

Minekawa has a new solo album out now, her first in years, and it feels like a quiet return to the world she built in the 1990s as part of Tokyo’s Shibuya-kei moment, when a loose, playful constellation of artists including Pizzacato 5, Cornelius, and Kahimi Karie went global by treating pop like a cut-and-paste collage. Called Traces Of The Ceiling, we have limited copies of the record in stock.

But let’s reverse time for a sec.

Minekawa first appeared in the early 1990s as part of Fancy Face Groovy Name, the band she formed with Kahimi Karie before either of them became cult figures of the Shibuya-kei era. Working in the same orbit as Cornelius and that whole Tokyo pop underground, their music was light, cosmopolitan guitar pop with a quietly experimental streak, a place where Minekawa began testing the playful structures and off-kilter melodies that would later define her solo work.

As a solo artist from the mid 90s through the mid 2000s, Minekawa carved out a world that was entirely her own. Albums like Roomic Cube, Cloudy Cloud Calculator and Fun 9 used toy keyboards, early digital synths and her featherlight voice to bend pop into something playful, strange and quietly emotional and left a lasting imprint on experimental pop well beyond Japan.

After her long solo stretch, in the ’10s Minekawa entered a collaborative phase with American guitarist and producer Dustin Wong. On albums Toropical Circle, Savage Imagination and Are Euphoria, they fused looping guitars and drifting electronics into a sound that never quite sat inside any one scene, something Minekawa captured simply when she told Time Out Chicago, “A lot of music gets put into very specific categories here. I don’t think that we fit into those categories. We’re outsiders.”

Issued by Tone Poem, her new album traces of the ceiling is a collaboration between Minekawa and visual artist Ippei Matsui. As explained by Tone Poem:

The approach to ‘traces of the ceiling’ is that of a diary – shared between Takako’s intimate musical pieces culled from daily experiences, documented between October and December 2018 (with a single piece recorded in August 2020) – alongside pieces of original silkscreened and risograph printed artwork by Ippei, each with their own unique qualities for the viewer to connect with as an intimate snapshot of the creative process as well as a beautiful intricate momentary work to cherish. In this way, both artists’ contributions to the work contain the essence of shasei (写生), or a momentary sketch of life – presented as a personal snapshot musically and visually, as if an entry in a diary.

This is a special release. Per Tone Poem: “Each record was printed and assembled in Portland, Oregon by SP and Secret Room Press, with a five-panel silkscreened folding sleeve and two very special risograph inserts of original artwork by Ippei Matsui. The audio was mastered by Makoto Oshiro.”

Unfortunately we do not have embeddable audio for it, but you can find the album in the In Sheep’s Clothing shop along with a video teaser that gives you a first, fleeting sense of what she is up to now.