It’s music you’d be unlikely to hear anywhere else in the city, says musician Robbie Stickland, who often goes to her six-hour weekly slot at Fidelity on Queen Street.
Emmy Shigeta was sharing her regular slot at Fidelity on Queen Street last Sunday with Brian Fallon, a friend and DJ who performs under the moniker Drua.
While Fallon occupied the decks for the first hour, she took a stool in the corner of the room, wearing all white.
Later, Shigeta spun a track called “Capriccio and the Innovative Composer” by the late Japanese ambient artist Susumu Yokota, sampling classical compositions.
It had rapid cascades of piano keys and a looping flurry of indistinct voices, which seemed to imitate the cooing of pigeons.
Shigeta specialises in sets with ambient electronic music and pop from ’70s and ’80s Japan. At Fidelity, hers is a six-hour weekly slot, she says. “I always play over 100 records every Sunday.”
It’s music that you would be unlikely to hear anywhere else in the city, says indie songwriter Robbie Stickland, a frequent attender. “I don’t go to a lot of DJ sets. But this is a unique thing.”
From Kichijōji, a neighbourhood in west Tokyo, Shigeta moved to Dublin to study in 2018, she says. “When I came here, I didn’t have a purpose and I didn’t think I wanted to be a DJ.”
She had grown up immersed in music. She worked for a few years at a branch of HMV in Shibuya, a city in the Tokyo prefecture, she says. But “I never DJed at big events back there. I would do friends’ parties or sometimes in the store”.
Once in Dublin, the first places Shigeta would frequent regularly were local record shops, like AllCity in Temple Bar, she says. “Every afternoon I would go.”
She became a familiar face in the store and they invited her to DJ at a Record Store Day event, she says. “And when that concluded, the staff contacted me, asking if I wanted to do a radio show on Dublin Digital Radio. It sounded great.”
As a DJ in Dublin, Shigeta soon made a name by playing city pop records, a genre of Japanese pop music strongly influenced by disco and funk.
City pop gained international traction in the 2010s, super-charged after an obscure 1984 single called “Plastic Love” by singer Mariya Takeuchi went viral on YouTube in 2017.
But actually, Shigeta had zero interest in the genre before she moved to Ireland, she says. “I loved music from soundtracks and hip hop.”
“I used to hate city pop,” she says. “I really didn’t like it, because when I worked in the record shop in Tokyo, a lot of European people, mainly, were buying it. But it felt like my mom and dad’s taste in music.”
What brought her around to it was when she spun a few of its numbers at her Record Store Day gig. It felt like a bridge between Dublin and Tokyo, she says. “It felt like an amazing chance to be this connection.”
Shigeta warmed to city pop after giving it a chance, she says. “Digging into it, I began to love more and more of the underground city pop.”
But, she says, what she loved even more was that it gave her an opportunity to share and explore the more leftfield artists active on the peripheries of the genre during its heyday. “There was an amazing ’80s avant-garde scene, and ambient music as well.”
Throughout the evening in Fidelity, Shigeta leant towards the ambient end of her record collection, airing tracks by experimental saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu and remixes of works by the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Her selections have introduced the city to an array of artists past and present, says Robbie Stickland. “I had a basic knowledge of the famous stuff, like ‘Plastic Love’ and I was a big Haruomi Hosono fan.”
“But it was through Emmy that I learned so much more about city pop,” he says. “A lot of the artists I love now, stuff like Miki Matsubara and Yellow Magic Orchestra, I heard for the first time through her sets.”
One of the more recent favourites of Shigeta is Meitei, a Hiroshima-based experimental composer, whom she once devoted a full hour to on her Dublin Digital Radio slot.
Because of that show, the composer was added to the line-up of Haunted Dancehall, a dance and electronic festival at the National Concert Hall, she says. “I was so happy that I was able to DJ there as well. It was this great night.”
Inversely, Shigeta brought underground Irish artists to a Japanese audience. In Tokyo, she distributed records by the rapper Kojaque and experimental ’70s folk artist Michael O’Shea, she says.
“Japanese people only know a few bits of Irish music, like My Bloody Valentine,” says Shigeta. “So I decided that I wanted to bring some of the scenes here to Japan.”
One evening in late December, around the corner from Fidelity, the Screen One theatre in the Lighthouse Cinema was packed.
On the large screen was a photograph of Shigeta, lying beside a window overlooking the north Dublin cityscape.
The photo was a play on the opening scene of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film, Lost in Translation, which was screening back-to-back with a DJ set by Shigeta in the bar afterwards.
Shigeta, who also worked at the cinema, had selected the film for a “staff picks” series.
The soundtrack bridges the gap between Dublin and Tokyo, featuring songs by Irish guitarist Kevin Shields and Japanese rock group Happy End.
This was a revolutionary soundtrack for Shigeta, says writer Shauna Smullen, who met Shigeta through the Lighthouse where they both started working the same week. “It’s a gentle film about loneliness where music fills its silent gaps, or in a karaoke bar, it speeds up the connection between people.”
Shigeta’s DJ sets serve a similar purpose, says Smullen. “She’s kinda creating a little community, this environment that everybody is drawn to, and I mean, loads of people know each other by going to an Emmy DJ set.”
She’s the glue between people, many in the musical community, who might rarely go out to see another DJ perform, says Stickland. “It’s her charisma, the all-white uniform, she’s able to connect with people and because of that, they consistently come to her gigs.”
“Pitched as ‘avante hyperpop’, her music can sound like what Mariah Carey might cook up if she spent more hours hanging out in video arcades and reading radical literature.”
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