By 1997, Japanese musician Keigo Oyamada was already well known in his home country, having hit it big with Flipper’s Guitar, one of the leading bands in the Shibuya-kei orchestral pop scene. But that year, Oyamada released his third solo album, Fantasma, under the name Cornelius, and its exhilarating, genre-defying sound carried his name and reputation around the world.
Fantasma took the glorious melodies of the Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach and pushed them through Beck’s cut-and-paste aesthetic, incorporating bits of rock, hip-hop, jazz, tropicália, electronica, indie pop, funk, and soul. (A good example of the album’s unconventional structure is the song “Chapter 8 ‘Seashore and Horizon,’” which veers back and forth between dreamy Cornelius-led interludes and an acoustic song performed by indie-pop heroes the Apples in Stereo, with sections separated by the chunk-chunk sound of flipping a cassette tape.) Fantasma is a crate-digger’s delight, a masterwork of musical collage, an incredible headphone experience, and a high point of indie’s ’90s heyday. Cornelius released Point in 2001 and Sensuous in 2006 before going underground for about a decade to focus on remixes, production work, soundtracks, and other film music.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, of course, so last year, when Cornelius announced a new album called Mellow Waves, a whole generation of indie rockers rejoiced. Mellow Waves isn’t as genre-allergic or fascinating as Fantasma, but its sound is most certainly reflected in the title. It’s lush, laidback, and effortlessly beautiful–solid evidence that all these years later, whatever Cornelius touches still turns into odd-pop gold.