Cornelius: Classic or Dud?

I always thought Point was an absolute winter album, but having pumped it from the ghettoblaster in the backyard while drinking beers in the hot hot summer sun, I realize I was completely incorrect.

I kinda think Keigo's talents would be very well utilised making a CHILDREN'S ALBUM.

Nicka otm - a kid's album would be the ish.

However, the new album Sensuous will soon be upon us. Singles are on Youtube:

Breezin'

Music

'Gum' (which is possibly an excerpt) is also up, as is 'Toner', as they're both off TV ads. 'Gum' looks locked to be an album highlight. 'Beep It', apparently a more electronic or even clubbier affair, will be released on 12" with remixes by Crue-L Records, who are one of the old Shibuya-kei institutions.

Based on this evidence, it isn't as thematic as the previous 3 albums and isn't much distanced from Point, sadly. Oh, and 'Cue' is on this, which doesn't help a lot, really.

To top off, Matdor aren't releasing this.

Especially when Fritz was referring to one album (with a load of context behind it too) out of four (well, nine).

a) he's still using his sampled voice as long keyboard notes for entire songs, and
b) he's still obsessed with 3 against 2 rhythms.

I still enjoy Point quite a bit, but one thing that has started to annoy me about that album is his reliance on a) and b) above.

This may never have happened if he hadn't started a family

(also, Beck has nothing on Cornelius)

I got burned out on Fantasma too, but it really was my favorite album of 1998, and over time, I think it'll age well. It just ain't relevant right now I guess.

None of his other albums moved me from beginning to end.

Keigo's cloning always seemed more like the acts of someone who loved certain songs so much, it was more an act of "what if I wrote that?" only it always seemed more bastard pop driven, which is a lot of fun. 'The Quizmaster' (from Flipper's last album)= the best bits of 'Loaded' AND 'I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have' with more uplift. 'Last Night In Africa'= effectively mashing 2 Beastie songs ('Rock Hard'/'So Whatcha Want'), replacing the AC/DC sample with Zeppelin and sticking a rejig of 'Whole Lotta Love's' breakdown in the middle for good measure. 'New Music Machine'= even MBV could stand to be sunny on occasion. I mean, dude even made a song about his second album using many of the melodies, drumming, samples and motifs.

CM is possibly the best "pure" Cornelius production, as it's way less contextual than the preceding stuff, goes through his influences as genres rather than as specific songs as he did on occasion and also ups the production ante somewhat from Fantasma.

PappaWheelie - very good P5 record, which he did before he even put out his first album, but I think the Cornelius Rock'n'Roll Orchestral Circus version of 'Happy Sad' is the only one I've wanted to hang onto.

And I don't really care that this new stuff sounds exactly the same as the late 90s stuff did, but I am really surprised that he hasn't changed his aesthetic at all. Ok, all right, fine, and i'm also a little disappointed.

First time I heard Sensuous I was all "Oh crap this is like Point" but it only bothered me for a few minutes and I really got into the whole journey feel of the album. It really does bring out a number of different moods that kind of crossfade into one another. I think his reliance on the same samples is not holding him back -- I mean, how hard would it be for Cornelius to record some new sounds and use those? No, he's doing it on purpose. He's realizing that development doesn't just mean new sounds, but new arrangements, new ways of looking at the same sounds.

Not that the arrangements are new at all on first glance either; he's used that staccato single-word arrangement for lyrics before, he's done the guitar-picking-echoes slightly out of time thing before, he's used the-beat-goes down like its drowning thing before. But it's the way they're all intertwined here, it's the moods they create and the feelings that each interrelated song connect.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I like it, alot more than I thought I would at first. Perfect music to put on repeat while you're doing graphic design or taking the train across town..

Going back to his roots, I've been really getting into Flipper's Guitar first 2 albums lately

Goodbye, our pastel badges (1989)

Camera! Camera! Camera! (1990)

Sensurround DVD is amazing, and on netflix!

this dude is somewhat awesome

Fantasma is flat-out incredible. I would pick out highlights but it doesn't dip below awesome at any point. Perhaps "Clash" and "God Only Knows" are the truly special moments. Loved PappaWheelie's Amazon review! Yeah, I'm sad and that.

Sensuous is great also. I've had that one a long time. "Music" is wondrous. I *think* the best song on Point is "Fly", and that is a quieter but still groovy record. What a dude!

Like, how can you have the balls to call a track "God Only Knows" and then turn out this astonishingly beautiful 7 1/2-minute bliss-noise-ambient-pop opus? That middle-eight. Oh shit, that middle-eight. It's like Lonely Soul never had to happen after all. And the final minute....gah, we'll be here all night if I don't pipe down.

Anyone know what Cornelius has been up to? I was big into him in 2007 when I saw him live - the show was incredible, btw...but haven't heard anything from him since. His last release is CM3, which doesn't seem to be too well-known, and most of the remixes are a few years old, like the Denki Groove/Scha Dara Parr one. It's probably his least consistant but his remix of James Brown's "Call me Super Bad" was incredible!!

Haha, am listening to P-Model right now and am unsurprised this thread has been bumped :D

love love love Fantasma and Point.

no connection as far as I know, just kicking up a bunch of old threads related to Japanese technopop musicians

there's a huge connection with Cornelius and YMO though; he guests on Sakamoto's and Hosono's albums and was kind of a "third member" of Sketch Show for a while, plus I think he performs regularly with them now

It did inspire me to give another listen to Point again...forgot how amazing the stretch of music in the middle - "Point of View Point", "Tone Twilight Zone", "Bird Watching At Inner Forest", "I Hate Hate", and "Brazil". "Bird" in particular has been my favorite track off any of his albums.

Fantasma is one of the best records of the 1990s IMO, featuring the best song called 'God Only Knows' ever written FACT

I don't have 'Point'! Need to give it a spin or two. Love 'Sensuous' even if it is a bit more 'mature' than Fantasma; it's also big and bold and beautiful. 'Music' is the chillest shit.

For whatever reason Sensuous never really clicked with me until I saw it live. I'm still not sold on every track but "Like a Rolling Stone" had this weird video with like toy people who were like spinning themselves into rocks and back again; really weird and creepy but I wouldn't like the tune otherwise. I think the title track was the last song he played and it actually worked really well. Just wish the guy would hurry up and release something new!!!

Classic.

Fantasma - Point - Sensuous is an insane run of perfection to my ears.

Just broke out "Point" again, wow that album still sounds great. It's fairly unique in how much of it feels electronic while using a bunch of acoustic instruments. Some songs sound like they have two or three drummers even though they don't have complex drum parts. Just sounds like a bunch of robotic musicians plugging away at their one chord or percussion instrument. I love how it "loosens up" in the middle then goes back to being utterly gorgeous. Maaan I wish he'd come back :(

i always loved that album, but found the one before it a bit too cheeky. What was the follow up like?

not as good, and really the only Cornelius album that wasn't a huge step forward from the previous one. it still had a lot of gorgeous moments and some cool abstract parts, worth a listen if you liked Point

Sensuous(the follow up) is really wonderful. I like it better than Point, personally.

I don't know about this "not a huge step forward" thing. how is Point a "huge step forward" from fantasma as opposed to just a lateral shift to more abstract compositions? I guess you mean that the style of Sensuous is not a big break from that of Point, and yeah I would agree.

im really just talking like in the evolution of his own sound. i dont want to imply that it's necessarily better or more 'evolved' than his past stuff (though i do think it is)

heads up, the new salyu record "s(o)un(d)beams" is produced by Cornelius and very clearly sounds like his last two records but with a better vocalist

find it so hard to process cornelius as anything other than 'music people on message boards were listening to when i started using the internet'

not familiar w/any of the older salyu records but I've been enjoying this one too. great voice for this type of project, definitely, and I esp like when cornelius cuts loose and gets a little crazy cutting-up or layering her vox.

thought this was a standout track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C1xB3Ybw2o

like the way different loops spill onto each other. p hypnotic.

I esp like when cornelius cuts loose and gets a little crazy cutting-up or layering her vox

I like this too. I feel like Cornelius either has a very strict comfort zone or is intentionally limiting himself, so whenever he breaks out the result is often great. A good example is his "Super Bad" James Brown remix which starts as typical Cornelius fare (*bwoomp* *slap* *bwommpslap* x100) but actually comes together beautifully and grooves in the second half.

listening to the salyu x salyu again this morning. really like the レインブーツで踊りましょう/ s(o)un(d)beams / Mirror Neurotic stretch. feel like it neatly summarizes all the styles salyu and cornelius are working on w/this album.

first track is working in a fairly traditional shibuya-kei/jpop mode w/strings and 'live' instrumentation, etc. coda is quite nice too and bleeds well into the more ambient (and gorgeous) title track. the gentle 4/4 kick drum and other techno flourishes are cool too. then 'mirror neurotic kicks' in w/maybe the most active arrangement on the album. love this track.

I definitely like this album a lot but I do wish there were a couple more upbeat tracks like 'mirror neurotic.' a remix lp could be v cool, I think.

also, I had never heard that james brown remix before. it's good!

his remixes of Sketch Show (Yukihiro Takahashi and Haruomi Hosono) are both excellent too, like incredibly beautiful and kinda the summation of everything he goes for in this mixes.

i'd love to see him do an album with those guys but I don't know if he's capable of putting out anything that doesn't sound like Point outtakes right now!

I guess it's possible, maybe even a little likely, that nothing he did was all that out of the ordinary for a Japanese high school student

lmao wtf is this

yeah this hadn't really been an issue for me but i've struggled to enjoy Cornelius's music since i heard about the bullying. i don't know if it's because he was one of my favorite artists, because i was bullied myself or if my attitude is changing.

it certainly doesn't help that he boasted about it years later. he really seems like he's not a nice person.

in theory, i don't have a problem with liking work made by a shitty person. his music is not exactly intimately personal or self-revealing. but it's an intuitive response, not a rational decision that i get to make.

i enjoyed his last album and tour. i'm sure i'll give the new one a listen or two, but getting into it might be a challenge.

fwiw i don't know if i buy the angle that he was playing up his bad behavior for notoriety. with Marilyn Manson there were always comments circulating about what a smart, normal, reasonable person he is irl and surprise! he turned out to be Marilyn Manson in real life.

xxp

lmao wtf is this

― young sussy (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, April 28, 2023 5:34 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Paraphrasing the Japanese people I know who say bullying is a huge problem and was particularly bad in the 80s and 90s

Again, kinda depends on if you read his comments as being exaggerated and/or made up, which he claims is the case now, but obviously no one knows

fwiw i don't know if i buy the angle that he was playing up his bad behavior for notoriety. with Marilyn Manson there were always comments circulating about what a smart, normal, reasonable person he is irl and surprise! he turned out to be Marilyn Manson in real life.

wish I could find it now but I did read some article explaining that this sort of thing wasn't too uncommon amongst Japanese counterculture artists back then, you had a lot of musicians who for instance would play it mostly straight and then have one song that was absolutely disgusting. iirc the author didn't exactly think he was innocent, but figured that some of the most extreme stuff in that interview shouldn't be taken at face value. but yeah kinda hard to compare the two because Cornelius's stuff is so purely musical and his last album is the only one that felt personal at all. his public persona is just a blank face. pre-Fantasma Cornelius is something else though.

maybe that's who he really is, in a way. one of my best friends who released music on Cornelius's label and traveled to Japan at his invitation says he made himself very scarce. Another friend who collaborated with Cornelius on music in the 90's says they never actually met. i get the impression that he likes to keep his distance.

Paraphrasing the Japanese people I know who say bullying is a huge problem and was particularly bad in the 80s and 90s

i've heard stuff to this effect also, when i asked my friend about it who is Japanese and who's parents currently live in Japan, he seemed very puzzled and pretty weirded out by it, and i was very sorry i asked.

(it was re: Cornelius, he's a fan too)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CT7E-PNhK-q/

he did later deny the worst of the incidents mentioned, saying that one of the magazines had embellished the stories to make him seem like the perpetrator of things he said he'd only witnessed. it's a real mess trying to figure what happened due to the language barrier & lack of access to the original articles - he claims that a blog post (which seems to be one from 2006 that was widely used as a source for the contents of the articles when this all blew up) further embellished the interviews and that in the quick japan interview he did deny being the perpetrator, but obviously that's very difficult to verify on my own. this statement also notably doesn't mention the other bullying incidents at all, just the worst two.

was this just something people did in the 90s? give interviews where they tried to be as edgy and over the top as possible?

yeah there apparently very was much a culture of that in 90s japan, and he used that as an explanation for the tone he took in the interviews at the time: https://archive.is/G0Zhv

it seems likely that he was involved in some of the bullying given that he didn't deny the other incidents, but maybe not the worst of it (but knowing if he really did deny the worst of it at the time as he claims would help to clarify things), and either way he took a pretty terrible attitude to it in the interviews to try to seem edgy.

Paraphrasing the Japanese people I know who say bullying is a huge problem and was particularly bad in the 80s and 90s

― frogbs

mmmm, i mean. bullying was a huge problem where and when i grew up, but i mean... bullying other kids wasn't _out of the ordinary_, the kids who bullied me weren't _unusual_, but it wasn't _normal_ in the same sense that, say, casual transphobia was.

idk, now that i think about it, the guy who bullied me in high school is one of the people i remember most fondly. i think better of him than i do of my childhood best friend, though admittedly that's a pretty low bar to clear.

maybe that's stockholm syndrome or whatever, but it gets back to, again, abuse isn't something bad people do to good people. it's learned behavior. that kid who abused me, i don't know for sure what he went through but it was obvious he had a lot of bad shit happen to him. and the way he looked at me... i don't know, it kind of changed over the course of high school. like i think in his own way he wanted to help me be a normal kid, a normal teenage boy. i mean, wasn't gonna happen, any more than he was gonna be a normal teenage boy, but i understand that desire. you look at someone who's fucked up and weird and it's frustrating, like, why do you have to be so fucked up and weird?

i talk about this with people i know a lot, because "fucked up and weird" comes standard on trans people, and it makes things kind of difficult sometimes.

none of this should be construed as an apologia for oyamada, though. anyone who does that shit needs to live with the consequences, which, i mean, i guess is that i won't listen to his album, a fact which he will neither know nor care about. so yeah. take that, oyamada.

yea thats a messed up thing about it. I grew up in a small town and sometimes you wind up at parties with people you went to middle school with and when they see you 10 years later they act like you're some long lost friend. and you're just like, wait a minute, this dude used to make me feel like shit, but I guess they don't see it that way. I kinda got that impression from that article, where the interviewer asks "well where is he now?" and Cornelius says something like "ah, I dunno, we haven't talked in a while". like he thinks they're friends or something.

one time in high school I snapped on another guy. he was clearly trying to get under my skin and I shoved him against his locker pretty hard and said some mean shit to him. I dunno what got into me, I'm not like that, I just lost it. it sucked because we were friendly with each other before that. and I kept thinking, "he thinks I'm a bully", but seriously it's the only time I did anything like that. I saw him tending bar at a nice place after that and we caught up and all that, all I could think is how bad i felt about what happened, and I'm sure he was thinking about it too. but I felt like bringing it up would make us both feel bad so I didn't.

yea thats a messed up thing about it. I grew up in a small town and sometimes you wind up at parties with people you went to middle school with and when they see you 10 years later they act like you're some long lost friend. and you're just like, wait a minute, this dude used to make me eat my own faeces and masturbate in front of other students.

abuse isn't something bad people do to good people. it's learned behavior.

yeah, sorry for the lazy post, i don't know if i believe there are "good people" and "bad people" or not.

i think in his own way he wanted to help me be a normal kid, a normal teenage boy

omg soooo true. and yet, i'm probably never gonna be ascended enough for my empathy to extend to authoritarian behaviors and personalities.

met my bully at a 4th of July thing about three years after high school and he was being very friendly and I was pretty confident and I said "last time I saw you you were hunting me down to kick my ass" and he said "oh. yeah, sorry. I'm not an angry person any more" and my heart softened because I could see that it was true. he was fucked up then and since then he'd grown. we hugged it out. people's fuckin frontal cortexes don't finish forming until sometime in their twenties, teenagers do fucked up shit. they should be sorry as grownups and make amends when they can but being mercilessly "well but the shit you did was SO FUCKED UP" really doesn't help anybody in this world at all imo. some people are already completely beyond the pale and some people get caught up in some poisonous ways of being when they're young and later see the error of their ways and this shouldn't even be a controversial position

imo

yea thats a messed up thing about it. I grew up in a small town and sometimes you wind up at parties with people you went to middle school with and when they see you 10 years later they act like you're some long lost friend. and you're just like, wait a minute, this dude used to make me eat my own faeces and masturbate in front of other students.

― young sussy (Whiney G. Weingarten)

so there was this guy in our high school who rented out porn tapes to the other kids, right? everybody knew about it, except me, because i was that fucking uncool. and one day this kid who's, i don't know, maybe a little less uncool than me. he had a richard dean anderson mullet and the same k-mart hypercolor t-shirt that i did. anyway for whatever reason the videotape he returned was a videotape of him masturbating with his finger in his ass. (the town had gotten super gentrified since my parents bought a house there, our family was one of the only ones in town without a camcorder.) i don't know if this guy had just accidentally returned the wrong videotape or if he was coming on to this other kid or what.

anyway the kid who was renting out the porn tapes did as you do, he threw a big party and invited everyone (i wasn't invited, of course, because i was that fucking uncool) and showed everybody the videotape. well that made enough of a big splash that even _i_ heard about that one the next monday.

it was a whole big thing, the kid's whole family packed up and moved away because of it.

anyway i don't know what your baseline for "normal bullying" is whiney but what cornelius did is kind of inline with my high school experience.

... i feel like this is pvmic for me

While all that is true, and I know it makes me a lesser person, you will have to pry my blinding hatred of my bullies from my cold, dead, hands, both of them sending middle fingers up to D. Spivy. Burn in hell, shitbag.

I hate going to my old hometown. It’s so small that the chance of running into a painful memory is too high.

xpost how is laughing at the local pervert making revenge porn of himself anything like making a disabled kid eat his own shit?

Disabled kid with a mouth full of “faeces”: boyfs will be boysf

Like I don’t have a horse in the race on whether you should or shouldn’t listen to Shibuya-kei artist Cornelius in 2023, I’m just saying the reasoning and bargaining and gymnastics happening in this thread is very, very funny

thank you so much for policing the thread Whiney, it warms my heart to know good people still exist in ILX

anyway here's a story that is perhaps relevant to the discussion. one of the guys I went to high school with named Matt used to tell stories of his sexual encounters and they were usually kinda rapey. he'd hook up at parties with a girl who had way too much to drink and did stuff while she was either passed out or severely inebriated. I remember asking him "uhhh you sure that's okay dude" and he'd be like "oh yeah, she enjoyed it, I got her phone number after" and so on.

this guy would show up to our parties now and then a few years later. of course by that time I was thinking "yeah, that's 100% rape". one day a group of girls came in including one of the girls he'd mentioned. and so I told her "hey uh just so you know, Matt's here". she said "uhh who?" and I was like "we went to school with him, remember?". she recognized him but was curious why I'd pointed that out, and as it turns out his entire story was just made up. he said it just to impress people, because when you're 17 beer and sex were like, super cool

not saying all his stories were made up, but I do recall some of us wondering where exactly these things were happening. there weren't exactly a lot of parties going on back then. and now I think man, if someone had recorded that, or you had posted about it online, that shit could be really bad for you some day.

anyway I apologize for all the reasoning and bargaining and gymnastics but yes, if nobody's gonna corroborate any of the things said in that interview then I have to think there's at least some chance it was either exaggerated or largely made up, especially when it comes to things that kinda seem incredibly difficult to actually do to another person.

thank you so much for policing the thread Whiney, it warms my heart to know good people still exist in ILX

― frogbs

personally i don't mean it sarcastically, i think it really is cool that whiney still genuinely has the capacity for moral outrage

the point of my little anecdote was not to excuse or mitigate what mr. oyamada did. i don't plan on listening to the album, i'm kinda done with him and his career.

i'm just not really _upset_ about it. i wish i was. i wish i could be. the world is filled with horrible people who do awful things and mostly they're the ones who are the biggest successes, that's how you get to be a success in this world, do awful shit and laugh about it.

i'm burned out. i've been burned out for a long time. i have empathy fatigue. if people want to listen to cornelius or eat chick-fil-a or buy the new harry potter game.

well. i'm glad whiney has the ability to get upset about those things. i think his capacity for outrage makes him a really good ally.