Just what we need: another Japanese club-music compilation. I still get a lot of enjoyment out of the old "Dance 2 Noise" series, and the "Sushi 3003" collection is what I usually recommend to the uninitiated. However, "Sushi" came out in '96, and while even a cursory listen to "Tokyo: the Sex, the City, the Music" proves that not much has changed in six years, it also shows that Tokyo's music scene is quite resilient. The usual suspects are here -- Cornelius, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Takkyu Ishino, Mondo Grosso -- as well as a few DJ/programmers I'm not that familiar with (Mansfield, who rates two cuts), but compiler Andrew Jackson seems less interested in covering the bases (dub, house, two-step are represented; hip-hop is conspicuously absent) than in keeping the party going.
Part of a "City Series" of comps put together by Australia's Petrol Records (others include Dublin, Paris and Berlin), "Tokyo" is not anthropology. According to the tongue-in-cheek (and grammatically dodgy) liner notes, our capital city is one of the "hubs of the universe that bring us the height of fashion, sex, and most importantly music that . . . fills your mind with the freedom that only swinging from a chandelier can offer." Good luck in finding a chandelier at Milk, but despite the corny retro-Playboy diction, the music that Jackson has put together really is cosmopolitan.
Opening with the liquid, discofied Shibuya-kei sound, the album snakes through a variety of styles and tempos. There's a pattern here that's difficult to isolate, but one notices a marked preference for flutes, Latin percussion and break beats. When the tracks aren't overlapped, Jackson glues them together with familiar city sounds, like train-schedule announcements and department-store chatter -- the kind of everyday stuff that can get annoying but, removed from its context, sums up nicely what Tokyo is about. The chipper tone proves a perfect fit. One thing about Tokyo club music is that it's happy but not sappy. If I were a club kid living in Berlin or Dublin or Paris and I heard this album, I'd grab the next plane.