My name's Ian Martin, and I'm a 30-year-old British event organiser, DJ and record label owner. I came to Japan seven years ago after finishing university, just for an adventure. But I got really interested in the music scene and ended up sticking around. In 2005, I put out my first compilation of Japanese bands on my label, Call and Response Records. I'm mostly into releasing post-punk and new wave stuff, but I put out some hardcore and noise too.

Recently, I put out a compilation featuring 21 Japanese underground bands covering Wire's Pink Flag album track-for-track. No one bought it because Japanese people don't know who Wire are. It was a really fun, if expensive, project to do.

Shibuya-kei is the only scene anyone really speaks about here. A lot of the people involved in it were already well connected to the music scene anyway, and it also had close ties with the fashion scene, which made it quite a hip thing to be involved in. It had an impact beyond just the musical aspect, which was important. After all, the music scene here is often unglamorous. Live venues are pretty shabby and music fans are quite drab, unfashionable people generally, so Shibuya-kei gave magazines something to write about. Really, though, it was just a catch-all term for indie music that was popular in the mid 90s and promoted by a few Shibuya record stores. There are still bands making the same kind of interesting music, but culturally speaking the media has found other things to make a fuss over.

Because there's no music press worth speaking of in Japan, it's hard for fans to break into the scene at first. But once you find a couple of bands you like, you can usually find more just by looking at who they play with. After a while you notice little scenes here and there. Organising events, you have to be aware of these little networks and recognise which bands will bring a decent crowd, as opposed to bands whose fans will just turn up to watch them play, and then sod off and ignore all the other people on the bill. In Tokyo there's an experimental punk scene, where a lot of bands I like come from. This is based mostly along the Chuo Line in places like Koenji, and in a few venues such as Shibuya O-Nest, Akihabara Goodman and Shimo-Kitazawa Basement Bar. Then there's a techno-pop/new wave scene that's absorbed some of the remnants of Shibuya-kei and mixed it with this 80s, Devo/Yellow Magic Orchestra/Plastics revival sound. There's also a thriving hardcore scene, and some districts like Shimo-Kitazawa, Akihabara and Koenji have their own musical identity too.

Getting people interested in the music is difficult. There are so many bands out there, and they're mostly rubbish, so getting the message across – "Hey, but this one's good – honest!" – is a Sisyphean endeavour. Japanese musicians are often more technically skilled, partly because bands play for much longer before they get anywhere. You never get popular indie bands still in their teens like you do in the UK. Perhaps because of this, experimental music in Japan is light years ahead of the UK.

The sort of people who go and see Japanese underground bands are a geeky niche, whereas to get popular, a band needs to attract a more casual audience, the sort that was indie enough to buy into Shibuya-kei but whose radar doesn't scan lower than that. These kinds of people generally look to British or US indie because it comes to Japan pre-packaged and with added credibility. I think some Japanese people don't give their country's music the time it deserves.

Ian Martin was talking to Alex Hoban