were able to listen to, quote, sample, mix, and dub this music, and eventually create a new hybrid music. In other words, Shibuya-kei was a byproduct of consumerism". Journalist W. David Marx notes that the musicians were less interested in having an original sound than they were about having a sound that reflected their personal tastes, that the music "was literally built out of this collection process. The 'creative content' is almost all curation, since they basically reproduced their favourite songs, changing the melody a bit but keeping all parts of the production intact." Specific touchstones include the French yé-yé music of Serge Gainsbourg, the orchestral pop of Van Dyke Parks and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, the lounge pop of Burt Bacharach, and the sunshine pop of Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. Wilson was romanticized as a mad genius experimenting in the recording studio, and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound was emulated not for its density, but for its elaborate quality. From él Records, Louis Philippe was heralded as the "godfather" of the Shibuya sound around the time he released the Japan-only albums Jean Renoir (1992) and Rainfall (1993). Reynolds adds that Postcard Records and "the tradition of Scottish indie pop it spawned was hugely admired, and there was a penchant for what the Japanese dubbed 'funk-a-latina': Haircut 100 ..., Blue Rondo à la Turk, Matt Bianco. The composite of all these innocuous and already distinctly ersatz sources was a cosmopolitan hybrid that didn’t draw on any indigenous Japanese influences." Development and popularity Flipper's Guitar, a duo led by Kenji Ozawa and Keigo Oyamada (also known as Cornelius), formed the bedrock of Shibuya-kei and influenced all of its groups. However, the term was not coined until after the fact, and its exact definition would not be crystallized until 1993. Many of these artists indulged in a cut-and-paste style that was inspired by previous genres based on kitsch, fusion, and artifice. In the West, the development of chamber pop and a renewed interest in cocktail music was a remote parallel. According to Reynolds: "What was really international was the underlying sensibility. ... The Shibuya-kei approach was common to an emerging class of rootless cosmopolitans with outposts in most major cities of the world ... known pejoratively as hipsters." Eventually, the music of Shibuya-kei groups and their derivatives could be heard in virtually every cafe and boutique in