“Paragon” is a cut off the last Fantastic Plastic Machine album to be released in North America, Beautiful. Tomoyuki Tanaka, the man behind FPM, is still making records, but the Shibuya-kei movement with which he is associated has retreated from Western shores. The breezily optimistic, retro-influenced pop sound doesn’t seem to play so well in a world filled with terrorists imaginary and real, climate change and environmental destruction, and the general sense of pre-apocalyptic ennui that has settled over everything in the past couple of years. Originally intended in some part to pay homage to the relentlessly forward-looking retro-futurism of the 60s, the sounds of Fantastic Plastic Machine, Pizzicato Five and Towa Tei now seem almost as out of touch as the original recipes.

Fantastic Plastic Machine took a more club-friendly approach to Shibuya-kei, especially on Beautiful. With more insistent four-on-the-floor beats on many tracks (including the single “Take Me To The Disco,” which strangely only appears on the album in remixed form as a bonus track), Beautiful is less lounge and more dance. Maybe that’s why it found a home on American label Emperor Norton Records, also past home to Japanese exports like Takako Minekawa and electro artists like Miss Kittin and Ladytron. Around the time electroclash became really popular, Emperor Norton was doing quite well; well enough that Rykodisc took notice and entered some sort of business arrangement with the label in late 2004. At that point Emperor Norton sat somewhere between “partner” and “victim of label merger,” and with the market falling out of both electroclash and Japanophilia, the name seems to have been quietly dropped, and label signees like Ladytron have gone on to release albums through Rykodisc. Does this explain why we haven’t seen a Fantastic Plastic Machine album in the States recently? Or maybe the scene has just petered out considerably, with most of the major players on hiatus or broken up.

Well, whatever. Even if Beautiful now sounds more like a turn-of-the-millennium cultural artifact, it’s still just as fun and crammed full of lounge-club goodness.