KKP contributor and friend JTM was very kind in sending over this book called "Obscure City Pop CD's 1986-2006" the other day, and I've been poring over it. Sure enough, I've been able to find a number of albums that I haven't seen even in my bible on the uber-genre, "Japanese City Pop".
One such album was the 1994 product of a collaboration between singer-songwriter Mikiko Noda（野田幹子）and guitarist-songwriter Tomofumi Suzuki（鈴木智文）who was once with the 1980s New Wave band Portable Rock. That band had a young Maki Nomiya（野宮真貴）as the vocalist and we Shibuya-kei fans know where she progressed some years later, don't we? Anyways, Noda and Suzuki's collaboration turned into the mini-album "Blue Eyes of Fortune" and the unit itself took on the same name.
Listening to one of the four tracks on "Blue Eyes of Fortune", "Vivienne", had me thinking Shibuya-kei immediately, but what also helped was just seeing that face on the album and the typeface for the title. It all screamed "Shibuya-kei" and fashion plating all over the Champs-Élysées. Written by Noda and composed/arranged by Suzuki, there is something uncanny about how similar Noda here sounds to the Divine Ms. Nomiya. And this isn't Noda's first dive into Shibuya-kei; a few years earlier, she had also tackled the genre with "Travelin' Heart".
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