The final installment in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Parts One, Two, Three, and Four.

Part Five: After Fantasma’s Japanese Release

How Matador Came to Put Out Fantasma in the U.S. and Europe

From the Matador website (complete with timeless Monica Lewinsky reference):

February 5, 1998
Some thrilling new signings to report, the first of which being Japanese pop mastermind CORNELIUS. His U.S./European debut, Fantasma will be released on March 24. For background purposes, the biography prepared by Mr. Amory will be online shortly. For now, an appreviated [sic] version is on our upcoming releases page. I could add something like “prepare to be blown away,” but I don’t know how you prepare yourself for that (not without running for office first)

Personal recollection from Isaac Bess, Matador employee in the mid-1990s:

My family lived in Tokyo for a year in 1986, and my parents went back to Tokyo again in 1996 for their second research trip. I was working at Matador at the time, having started in 1994 after college and doing mostly domestic and international distribution. I went over to Japan for Christmas and did my regular routine of listening to anything that looked interesting in the listening stations of Tower and HMV.

I remember seeing Cornelius’ first single “The Sun is My Enemy,” which I thought was a super cool song title, and all the other Cornelius releases had this amazing aesthetic. They were the kind of records that jumped out visually. I bought some Cornelius records and an amazing EP from Fishmans Long Season that I still dream of someday releasing on vinyl.

I brought these CDs back to New York and played them in the office. I don’t know what it’s like at the Matador office now, but at the time there were frequent battles over control of the office stereo. At some some point after us listening to Cornelius, it was determined that we’d reach out to Trattoria, the label on the back of the CD. I had zero Japanese label connections myself — we’d put out Pizzicato Five records but that was about it. I sent a fax to the number on the back of the CD, and as I recall, my fax letter was written in the worst Japanese of all time.

We traded some faxes back and forth, then some phone calls, and then a crazy, crazy care package of Japanese records arrived on our door. The packaging on those Trattoria records at the time was absolutely insane. I remember the whole office being totally blown away by those huge elaborate compilations. I don’t know how they might have made money on those things

We got an advance of Fantasma’s lead single “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” and I put it through the office ringer. I still think it is not nearly the strongest track on the record, but I liked all that frantic drum programming stuff, which was just starting to percolate into the non-DJ world. The response was good but not insane.

But when we got the full length, we reached out. Matador started a deal process (that I was not involved in), and we were off to the races. I quit a bit afterwards, but I got to spend time with Keigo and Hiroko (from Polystar) and the band in NY. Then I moved to Tokyo and saw more of them then.

Even now, it feels like Japanese labels aspire to have international success stories, largely to no avail. And at the time in Matador, we had, at least in relative terms, three — Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Guitar Wolf (depending on how you define success story, I suppose). I think the key was really in the marketing angle Matador took, which played little or none on “Japan = crazy!” It was more about “This record sounds absolutely genius.”

Fantasma is still a super dense record. I remember all the reviews citing the studio wizardry, the attention to detail around the recording process. From that point, I had little hand in the trajectory of the record, in the US or elsewhere, but it was extremely gratifying to see such critical acceptance.

How I Discovered Fantasma

If I recall correctly, I was at a real-deal “cocktail party” in the Spring of 1998, talking to Matt Murray and Dan O. Williams about my interest in Japanese pop. Dano asked if I had heard Minekawa Takako, which I had not, and he asked if knew about Momus, which I did not. He then mentioned if I had heard of Kahimi Karie, produced by Momus. I had not. He then said, oh so what do you think of Cornelius — he’s this important DJ / producer. Although I had become a Buffalo Daughter fan by this time, I clearly knew nothing about anything. I promptly went to Newbury Comics the next week after class and saw the Matador release of Fantasma sitting in the “New” bins — at $10.99 loss-leader pricing. I picked it up and headed home.

Upon returning to my door room, I popped Fantasma into the communal stereo and thought something was wrong with said stereo for the first minute as nothing came out but mostly inaudible sound effects. The rest of the album was equally mysterious and incomprehensible, although I distinctly remember liking the part in “Free Fall” where they say “Slow down” and then the song slows down. For the first three or four or five listens, I still prefered Buffalo Daughter, but went around believing that this was an epic, important record even if I didn’t particularly enjoy it or understand why. So I tried to convince myself that I loved it by convincing everyone else that it was amazing. During some study session, I let my classical music aficionado girlfriend hear “2010” which she saluted but then played her “Magoo Opening” which she did not. The fundamental problem was that mind just did not possess the capabilities to understand the musical sounds contained within — I didn’t get the references and did not even know what half the musical instruments were.

Upon visiting Tokyo in 1998, I took the album with me, listened to it in my lonely days walking the streets, and then started collecting used copies of Cornelius’ other CDs at the lowest prices I could find. I first picked up the remix album 96/69, which is not a good place to start. I do distinctly remember, however, finally getting my head around Fantasma the 15th or so listen, and I soon found myself in Ochanomizu, haggling over prices for a SP-202 phrase sampler and DR-202 drum machine.

Through convoluted circumstances of my internship at Kodansha, I ended up at a photo studio at the end of the summer where Oyamada Keigo was a model for a A Bathing Ape shoot, destined for the next issue of Hot Dog Press. I sat near Oyamada but did not talk to him until he was leaving, where I got him to sign my copy of Fantasma (coming directly out of my CD player) and the cover/CD of 69/96. He signed in an oddly bombastic backwards graffiti — SUILENROC. As I slinked away, Nigo came over and handed Oyamada a copy of the UNKLE album, which I then ran out and bought as well.

Cornelius toured the U.S. later that November with Natural Calamity, coming to Boston and playing to a room full of Japanese exchange students. I faithfully wore my A Bathing Ape T-shirt like the rest of the crowd, and Cornelius showed up in Ape uniforms. (Read Alex Pappademas’ early brilliance in this Phoenix review: “Amid thunderous applause, he laughingly accepted a “You da man!” high five off a dude in the front row.”) By this point, the Cornelius touring band was a tight unit, transforming his complicated Fantasma tracks into high-energy crowd pleasers. He also added a few particularly good live tracks “E” and the soccer themed “Ball in Kick Off,” with Horie (of Neil & Iraiza) in charge of blowing the referee whistle. (I spent too much money later on some weird German compilation that had “Ball in Kick Off” as the opening track.) He also passed around the SP-202 phrase sampler for the crowd to “play,” and since I had one at home and knew how it worked, I grabbed it confident that I could jam along with Oyamada. Unfortunately he had put something to block you from touching any of the controls so the best you could do was wildly press the buttons to make random noise.

What truly made the show though was the video visuals accompanying every song in perfect timing — cut-ups of lost children’s shows, retro 1960s groovy movie footage, and early visual effects. It appeared that the backing tracks were played off the videotapes, and drummer Migu faithfully listened to a click as she played. After the show ended, I said hi to Cornelius’ manager Takahashi, who vaguely remembered me from earlier in the summer. My roommate Chess and I walked home down Lansdowne street singing the a cappella opening to 69/96. That had been the best concert I had ever seen, only topped by Cornelius’ Point tour in 2002.

Cornelius After Fantasma

With Matador releasing Fantasma in both the U.S. and Europe, Cornelius transformed into a globally-recognized musical genius, which of course, made him an even bigger deal back in his home country of Japan. Cornelius spent the first few years after Fantasma in constant tour with his increasingly tight live band. This was documented in the video EUS, where Help! Films and long-time Oyamada visual partner Tsujikawa Koichiro’s Harvard Design turn cheap miniDV footage of the tour into an endless pageant of Pokemon seizure beauty (a few fragments are included on the Fantasma re-master boxset.).

Cornelius also began to remix every musician on the planet — a list that extended from fellow Tokyo bands like Buffalo Daughter (“Great Five Lakes”), Towa Tei (“Butterfly”), and Salon Music (“Galaxie Express 69 Mix”) to like-minded international stars Beck (“Mixed Business”), The Pastels (“Windy Hill”), and Coldcut (“Atomic Moog 2000”). In many cases, Cornelius improved on the original (Money Mark’s “Maybe I’m Dead,” in particular), but many of the tracks were mostly rebuilt with the Fantasma sound library to sound like Cornelius’ outtakes with guest vocals. The process of remixing, however, represented Cornelius’ entry into the global pantheon of producers. The kid who wrote “Goodbye, Our Pastels Badges” was suddenly remixing the actual Pastels. (It’s also telling that remixes of Cornelius have never been particularly good, as there is no much core “song” under the production to re-construct.)

Perhaps this over-use of Fantasma space noises and guitar riffs from 1997 to 2000 is what made Cornelius move so far away for his 2001 follow-up Point. Where Fantasma was additive — building soundscapes by piling on sounds on sounds, references on references, genres on genres — Point was completely subtractive. Oyamada essentially worked to free himself from the DJ cut-and-paste aesthetic, and instead, tried to deconstruct his own tastes to a building blocks of “pure” but original sounds. Cornelius told Suzannah Tartan in Japan Times, “This time I drew my ideas more from myself, my own biorhythms and environment. With ‘Point,’ I wanted to enable the listeners to immerse themselves in the music to have more blank space or open margins around the music. Because, by doing so, the listener will be able to include more of their own influences, of their own personal memory, or environment.” Essentially, Cornelius understood his own references to be too idiosyncratic — crowding out fans building better personal relationships with his music.

So Point contains almost no explicit references to other music, other than a relatively tame robot-vocaled cover of the classic “Brazil.” Instrumentation revolves almost exclusively around acoustic guitars, digital tones, and clipped live drum samples. If Fantasma was always on the brink of disaster, with loud noises and drones bleeding from one song to another, Point is in perfect control, with sounds muted and ended precisely after they serve their purpose. The song titles of Point even moved away from band names (the one exception “Tone Twilight Zone” is a joke on the outré pop label Tone Twilight founded by friend Emori Takeaki). We move from the nearly fourth-dimensional “Microdisneycal World Tour” to the one-dimensional “Drop,” the formless “Smoke,” and the zero-dimensional “Nowhere.”

Oyamada may have grown tired of Shibuya-kei’s melodic plunderphonics after doing it for almost a decade, but his peers were also moving to a similar direction. Point’s most direct influence is Kanda Tomoki’s landscape of smallers music from January 2001 — an atmospheric sound safari where Rhodes plucks sound like raindrops and Minimoog oscillators imitate buzzing insects on an African veldt. Between Point, Kanda’s record, Emori’s Tone Twilight catalog, Takemura Nobukazu’s “Sign,” Sunahara Yoshinori’s ice cold Lovebeat, and Kahimi Karie’s increasingly slow and abstract whisper pop, we suddenly had a new mini-genre “Nakame-kei,” named after the retreat of 30-year old Tokyo hipsters from the Shibuya commercial district to the slow-life of the cafe-heavy Nakameguro neighborhood where Oyamada’s 3D studio is located. Maybe too many people were doing the sample pop thing and the originators needed some distance, but Cornelius certainly chose a reverse course — away from music that contained explicit cultural signifiers to one completely intended to be sculpting of acoustic space.

Few were thrilled with this new direction. Oyamada’s friend Momus publicly referred to the album as “Disappoint,” and most of the foreign fans, who had only heard of this Oyamada character in the last two years, did not understand why he needed to change up the classic Fantasma formula. There certainly were ways to push the Fantasma methodology even further; I would argue that unofficial disciples Plus-Tech Squeeze Box used a massive base of samples to hyper-extended a Fantasma view of the music into an even more intense frenzy (listen to “Fiddle Dee Dee”). Oyamada instead decided he would rather make the kind of “original” sounds that get copied and referenced rather than try to recreate others’ iconic recordings.

The question is whether Cornelius gained something in moving away from eclecticism and diversity. Everything on Point essentially sounds the same. It is holistic, but it is one ride at Epcot — not the entire Magic Kingdom. While the opening track “Point of View Point” may be one of the most clever and rewarding songs of Oyamada’s career, the rest of the album is essentially re-thinkings of the same idea. The metal interlude “I Hate Hate” even feels rote.

Despite the tepid response to Point, Cornelius did successfully turn the material into one of the greatest live music spectacles of all time. Far from the DIY days of the Fantasma tour, Oyamada no longer cut up from silly video tape footage of the past, but created high-quality productions that perfectly embodied every single song. The songs suddenly became incredibly good soundtracks to interesting short films rather than “songs.” These videos, combined with clever lighting and projection effects, brought the Point songs to life on tour, and the resulting DVD Five Point One of the video work was a legitimate standalone audio-visual journey rather than a “DVD of the videos for an album.” Oyamada moved from musician to multimedia artist. Most importantly, he moved far from “curator” to an un-ambiguous original creator.

After Point, however, Cornelius went further down the rabbit hole, into a music based increasingly on abstract expressionist sound detached from the history of music. The first sign of this was the Eno-esque cherry blossom tone poem of “From Nakameguro to Everywhere.” Then Cornelius really doubled-down by choosing an entire album of young “Logic glitch-squirt bedroom cases” like dj codomo and DRITT DRITTEL for his “remix Point samples” contest. (As well as “MC Cat Genius’ BomBassTic Re-bomb / Animal Family featuring MC Cat Genius,” one of the strangest works ever committed to a major label release.) When Tokyo Fun Party organized a session at Uplink for all the Point remixers in 2004, Oyamada showed up to play a secret spot at the end and treated the crowd to strange guitar-manipulated digital delay jams much like Sensuous’ “Wataridori.” Gone were the cartoon clips or videos, replaced with dynamically generated computer visuals that reacted in time with the sounds.

This was even a step from Point, and when Sensuous hit in 2006 — five years after his previous album — Cornelius had made a full transformation into painter of the soundscape (my full review here). Besides the clever “Toner” duet with a inkjet printer, Sensuous is almost completely humorless, beginning with a four minute exploration into wind chimes and acoustic guitar strums. The Cornelius palette has recently contracted to a very small set of digital synth sounds that reverb into nothingness. The original quest for complete control over sound fragments in Point has transformed into a kind of digital mania. Oyamada may be the only person in the entire world who prefers fake digital piano samples to the majesty of the real thing.

To his credit, Oyamada is at least not repeating himself, and he has moved miles from the questionably derivative parts of his musical output. For a while though, everyone secretly wanted him to go back and make another Fantasma. Viewed in the lens of Simon Reynolds’ exhaustive indictment of modern culture’s Retromania, our enjoyment of Fantasma clearly stems from it being so directly referential — rewarding us for our obscure musical trivia, borrowing from the hallowed aura of Brian Wilson, and regurgitating retro timbres thought lost to the detritus of society but that still existed in the deepest trenches of our brain. It felt good. But after Fantasma had delivered this drug, he decided to instead become a true techno-optimist. He has attempted to make sounds that are fiercely new, that push digital technology far beyond the comfort zone. Noise bands cannot shock anymore with noise alone, but there is something deeply disconcerting about intentionally making songs with fake piano samples. This may have often felt boring and anondyne on Sensuous, but these production techniques worked wonderfully for singer Salyu on her breakthrough 2011 record s(o)un(d)beams (listen to the machine funk of “Mirror Neurotic”).

The great lament around Cornelius is not really related to Oyamada — we no longer live in an era where an album like Fantasma is joined with 3-4 other concurrent releases that proclaim and prove a brand new wave of creativity. Something like s(o)un(d) beams stands in isolation, a strange quirk of the music industry that Salyu’s industry drones would tap an avant-garde talent to produce her record. In the 15 years since Fantasma, the Japanese music scene can no longer muster the power to create albums that make the world wake up and even think their own domestic bands in a new context. Cornelius was able to achieve that and much more, but the album also came out during the penultimate year of sales for Japanese music — a time when there was tons of money to burn on eccentricism, and more importantly, there was something important at stake. Japan’s top musicians were possessed with a burning desire to make big, meaningful, genre-changing albums, because they knew that if they succeeded, there would be an equally meaningful response. If Fantasma appeared in 2012, no one in Japan would know what to do with it.

So our nostalgia and respect for Cornelius’ masterpiece will remain tied with with nostalgia and respect for the era when music rained as the king of popular arts. And what better record to symbolize this than a long musical tribute to music itself. There may be albums that inspire more nostalgic longing and more succinctly prick up the painful melancholy of teenage longing, but the sheer depth and innovation of Fantasma make it an album that can be enjoyed over the long run. The album is now historical — it stands for a certain age in the 1990s — but at the same time, it is an important textbook for an alternative musical history, where Bach, Bacharach, and the Beach Boys stand as the great triumvirate. We students have spent years decoding and translating the work, but more importantly, we have listened over and over and over again. Thank you for the music.

Part Four in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Part One — the introduction to the series as well as “The Age of Music Nerds” — Part Two — a look at Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma and the structure of Fantasma as an album — and Part Three — track by track analysis of Side One.

Part Four: Fantasma, Side Two

8. “Chapter 8 – Seashore And Horizon”
Side One of Fantasma ends with the chaotic jungle drone crescendo of “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” but at the beginning of Side Two (or if on a CD, the theoretical start of Side Two), we are immediately transported back into the pop realm with a song in the style of 1990s American indie pop heroes Apples in Stereo. Wait, this isn’t a song like Apples in Stereo — this is Apples in Stereo. A small yacht comes over the horizon and lands on an isolated beach with gently crashing waves. Out steps Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney who start to sing a duet with an acoustic guitar, bass, and an incredibly sea-friendly drum kit.

Cornelius plays a neat joke here: After an entire album of naming songs after bands and reimagining other bands’ songs, he decides, why not just invite my favorite band to actually be on the album? Schneider’s resulting co-composition is pleasantly Apples-esque, but at the :44 second mark, someone hits the button on the cassette player and we are transported to a similar, but completely different song sung by Oyamada, which essentially sounds like an Apples in Stereo copy. In this, the entire sequence essentially acts as a summary of Cornelius’ own methodology at work — an original composition, followed by a similar yet slightly less melodic copy.

Before we get too comfortable in the Oyamada take on Elephant 6, however, the tape rewinds back to Apples in Stereo for a slightly longer version of their realm, and then we again tape click over to Cornelius’ response. For the last minute, Cornelius’ maudlin version wins out the duel and takes us out of the track with an increasingly loud and trebly synth drone.

9. “Free Fall”
The drone of track 8 suddenly pitches and slows down to the exact pace of “Free Fall”’s AM-radio guitar riff. This turns into a driving mock rock epic with electronic flourishes of drum machine rolls and space-age synth sounds. The song itself could fit well within Oyamada’s previous work, which is to say, this is not Fantasma’s most mature moment. “Free Fall,” however, adds some critical “rock” to what is nominally a “rock album” — and giving us a tough masculine moment before the electronic and pop tracks send us out.

The song’s great highlight is the reductive instrumental solo that harmonizes what sounds like a heavily processed metal guitar and portamento Moog lines, each standing proudly in separate stereo channels. And we get another meta moment at the end as the lyrics command “Slow down!” and the song suddenly starts to crank the pitch down until we end up in a sludge.

10. “2010”
At some point in the middle of production, Oyamada turned to his staff and said, “We need some Bach on this puppy.” They then dutifully downloaded the MIDI for “Fugue in G minor BWV 578,” sped it up, flipped the major part to the front and the minor part to the back, ran it through dinky synths, and added a complex backtrack of ultra-fast techstep rhythms. A harmonizing robot chorus and a sample from Noah Creshevsky’s “Great Performances” introduce the end result — “2010.”

This works as a nice counterpoint to “Monkey” but more importantly, doubles down on the album’s late 1960s baroque retro-futurism — channeling the math, science, speed, and technology at heart of hit record Switched on Bach as well as the outer space wonder of Kubrick’s 2001.

11. “God Only Knows”
“God Only Knows” begins with a fly moving around the headspace — a classic stereo demonstration technique — and then giant power vacuums jutting into the left ear to dispose of the flying pest. These vacuums multiply, then morph quickly into synth pads, and with windchimes acting as star twinkles, we are suddenly listening to the very sound of the universe — as commonly represented at planetarium events in science museums. Soon typical Fantasma rhythmic elements appear to move the soundspace into an actual song, and we are greeted with a repetitive one-line crescendo drone chorus in the mold of “Clash.”

The overall tone is grandiose — God, space travel, Brian Wilson — but the comparisons to the original “God Only Knows” are not particularly flattering to Oyamada’s skills at melodic composition. Oyamada’s way of paying tribute to possibly the greatest pop song ever written is to create a gigantic sonic landscape with no true hooks.

Again, however, the “song” isn’t in the song — it’s in the production. The bridge is particularly impressive — with what sounds like radio waves from Earth beaming out to the far reaches of the universe. “God Only Knows” works as a triumphant and ambitious moment for an album that may have otherwise been understood as detached and insular. Oyamada here creates perhaps the most bombastic expression of music nerdism ever — music nerdism as religious experience. Even as the song rolls out in an enormous exit, Oyamada quietly sings a wispy version of Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” (also mentioned in the lyrics).

At the end, the vacuums appear again to suck up all the sounds, and Rita Moreno from “Electric Company” breaks the tension by screaming out: “Hey, you guys!”

12. “Thank You For the Music”
Fantasma thus begins its denouement with “Thank You For the Music” — a musical bookend to “The Micro Disneycal World Tour.” The instrumentation is similarly folky — bright guitars, harmonica, The Association harmonies, Sean O’Hagan himself on banjo — although it’s much more of a classic Oyamada lyrical song. In fact a less complicated version could have found a home on The First Question Award.

In good meta-album style, like the “Sgt. Pepper” reprise, the song’s lyrics point directly to the musical experience we have all enjoyed. (There is also a reference to “smiley smile” if you hadn’t figured out by this point that Oyamada really, really likes Brian Wilson.) There are multiple layers of gratitude at work here: thanking Oyamada’s favorite musicians for creating music, thanking the audience for coming along for the ride, thanking himself in the third-person for creating the musical journey.

At the bridge, the string descent of “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” returns but then moves into a cut-up radio wave sample fest that recalls other moments and elements from the album. This is critical to making Fantasma feel like a coherent whole, reminding us explicitly that we have been “places” — like a photo book from a vacation, with one short audio image to stand in for an entire previous soundscape. With the short-wave radio bursts noises, the entire thing sounds like it would to someone on another planet who is receiving all of the noise of human civilization and trying to make sense of it. The song ends with a polite refrain of “Adios” and then a tape delay that collapses into infinite speed and disappears with a fairy twinkle.

13. “Fantasma”
The name of final a cappella track “Fantasma” is most definitely an Os Mutantes reference, as Oyamada repeatedly mentioned listening to the band before he made Fantasma. The song offers a monkish, human minimalism as the end to an album all about instrumental maximalism. Behind all the machines, there actually was just one man — Oyamada Keigo. In the track, we just hear layers and layers of Oyamada’s heavily reverbed harmonies, in a song almost identical in production and melody to lost SMiLE track “Our Prayer.” As the Oyamada clones’ harmonies extend, falter, move around in the stereo space, and fade out, we are left with the single, real Oyamada, who gasps for air. The record is complete. Fantasma literally leaves Oyamada breathless just as John Henry is exhausted and dies on the spot.

Next time: Some personal recollections and Oyamada after Fantasma

Part Three in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Part One — the introduction to the series as well as “The Age of Music Nerds” — and Part Two — a look at Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma and the structure of Fantasma as an album.

Part Three: Fantasma, Side One

On August 6, 1997 loyal Cornelius fans headed down to the local record store to pick up their pre-ordered copy of Fantasma, went home, cranked up the stereo, and got ready to be blown away by what had been promised to be Oyamada’s most epic pop concoction. They were greeted, however, with something surely unexpected — an album beginning that contains nothing approaching “music” for the first minute and ten-seconds.

1. “Mic Check”
As Fantasma opens, we are treated to a suite of binaurally recorded noises — tape machine clicks, a filtered preview of the album’s final a cappella track, a drag on a cigarette (that we all hope deep down is a joint), reverb testings on opening a can of beer and the rustling of a potato chip bag, laughing, a toy dog, and whistling the First Movement of Beethoven’s 5th. Is this rock’n’roll? To the unprepared home stereo listener, the album starts off both disorienting and slightly boring, not exactly a harbinger of what is to come. Yet this opening sequence is necessary — Oyamada is demanding that you treat the album differently, begging you to come closer. After a few frustrated listens on speakers, you soon understand the sequence only makes sense in headphones for concentrated listening. Yes, there are moments of power, but Fantasma is a trip into head space rather than a full-blast rocker to crank on the speakers or a selection of mood music. “Mic Check”’s eerily quiet opening is Oyamada’s signaling of this fact.

Once the minimal break beat and autoharp strums crash in at 1:10, however, we finally move on to the first musical moment of the album — a song which in itself is a meta-musical commentary upon the recording process. We all understand that testing microphones is a practical necessity but this procedure to gauge microphone volume input has also become a performance cliché. By making it into the first track’s sole lyric — along with “Kikoemasu ka?” (“Can you hear me?”), the one-to-four countdown, the scratched words “echo” and “reverb” (from a turntable demonstration LP owned by MoOoG Yamamoto) — Oyamada raises high the signpost that further musical deconstruction lies ahead.

The final minute of the song moves closer to being a triumphant and loud pop song, but here we go with the meta-album. Between this ode to level testing and the liner note photos of Oyamada’s immaculate, orange recording studio, Cornelius is suddenly an engineer collective rather than a pop band. He poses like Brian Wilson leaning on a mixing board rather than Brian Wilson, I dunno, singing a song at a concert. Like many other musical giants in the 1990s, Fantasma worships at the altar of the producer.

2. “The Micro Disneycal World Tour”
Like Sgt. Pepper or any great concept record, Fantasma does not really get started until its second track “The Micro Disneycal World Tour.” The title is nominally a Sean O’Hagan reference, and the song is nominally Oyamada’s attempt at a High Llamas pastiche. While High Llamas’ pre-Fantasma work Hawaii was like being stuck in an infinite loop of The Beach Boys’ unreleased “Cabinessence” demos, “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” is a much more ambitious and sprawling sound adventure. He takes a vaguely SMiLE-era palette — musical saws, spritely harpsichords, acoustic guitars brighter than the sun, and the kind of harp strums that have come to signal “flashback” in TV shows — and makes a big dreamy statement that goes eons beyond O’Hagan’s Americana preciousness.

Cornelius has a bad habit of naming songs after other people, so perhaps we should ignore the O’Hagan reference entirely: the song’s title perfectly symbolizes the ‘60s internationalist kitsch permanently etched into the Magic Kingdom that may forever embody retro-futurism. Oyamada often compared the entire Fantasma album to “It’s a Small World” — explaining his own mish-mash of genres as akin to Disney’s mixed-up layout of national cultures.

Cornelius gives the 1960s Disney sound an update with breakbeats and electronic flourishes, but the rhythm is ultimately polka music hall. Cornelius never makes any vocal efforts beyond alternating baritone and falsetto ba’s and la’s. The bridge’s slowly descending string section is perhaps the most beautiful thing on Fantasma and the greatest production achievement of Cornelius’ entire musical career. And it certainly tops anything similar by The High Llamas. On Fantasma, not only did Oyamada go deeper into obscure references than his Western peers, he ended up out-producing their actual work. When O’Hagan later remixed the song himself, he made it sound exactly like the High Llamas would have: removing the dynamics and making it ignorable mood music.

3. “New Music Machine”
As “The Micro Disneycal World Tour” tape echos into chaos, track three “New Music Machine” enters in with high-pitched feedback and a machine gun snare drum roll. Oyamada wants us to know immediately that he can do the most modern of modern rock with as much panache as he can do ‘60s soft pop. “New Music Machine” works relatively well as a pop track on its own and is one of the few truly melodic songs on the album. The lyrics — referencing the not particularly famous mid-’60s L.A. garage band The Music Machine — are about a sonic satellite launched by NASA that fell apart, a techno-pessimism to counterbalance the Disney/Jetsons outlook in previous tracks.

Fantasma’s vast panoply of instrumentation makes you think Cornelius just threw everything at the album hoping to win through sheer numbers of sounds. Yet with “New Music Machine,” he perfectly combines electronic elements like d’n’b rolls and Moog drone with rock drums and guitar noise. For 1997, this genre combination was not only shockingly new but highly prescient for the last decade. Yet as we discover in the song, the rock and electronic elements all sound almost completely identical. The future apparently will be fully electronic… and sound exactly like rock music.

4. “Clash”
In case “New Music Machine” seemed too traditional, track four “Clash” returns to defy conventional song structure. The soundscape for the verse — bossa nova beats on an old drum machine, nylon-stringed bossa nova guitar, an organ drone, strummed autoharps delayed into psychedelic peacock patterns — works as a neat sonic shorthand for the Cornelius of the era. But the chorus is a total non-sequitur, possibly the strangest in pop history: an industrial cacophony of stilted drums, dissonant vocal melodies, an abstracted Brian Wilson vocal flourish, and a single lyrical mantra.

“Clash” is not a strong song by any means, but like “Fixing a Hole” on Sgt. Pepper it works as the key filler track to recombine previous sounds into codified album themes. It is also the “slow song” after the opening barrage, although you can imagine less adventurous listeners completely abandoning their mission after having to sit through almost six minutes of unresolved vocal harmonies chanting a single word. Even the entry of an arpeggiated synth in the final verse or Oyamada’s occasional chord change can’t make things less jarring.

5. “Count Five or Six”
This tension resolves, however, as the record “skips” and we are sent into the somewhat gimmicky “Count Five or Six” — a literal piece of math rock where the robots do all the heavy lifting on the vocals. The title is again a reference to a garage band, Count Five, who had faded out of the pages of musical history. (What came first, the intense need to name every track after obscure California garage bands or the tracks themselves? Was Oyamada reading a lot of Lester Bangs at the time?) The track is brilliant, however, both as a joke on a futuristic imaginary bizarro musical world where everything is in difficult 6/8 rhythms and a call back to the Speak-and-Spell era of early computer gadgetry. The best rock is apparently the most arithmetic.

6. “Monkey” (aka “Magoo Opening”)
The previous song ends in a field of guitar distortion, which, with the help of shortwave radio noise and Moog blurps, bleeds naturally into the next track “Monkey.” On the Matador release, the song is re-titled “Magoo Opening,” since they had to clear the rights to the samples by counting the track as a cover rather than an independent work. Almost the entire song comes from Dennis Farnon’s wacky opening theme on the 1957 LP Mr. Magoo in Hi-Fi.

On “Monkey,” Cornelius doubles down on his Ape-obsession by bringing in faux simian calls from the 1960’s r’n’b stomper “Monkey” by J.C. Davis and voice samples about “An escape from the Planet of the Apes” from what I assume is a spinoff storybook record from that film. For only being about 1.5 minutes of music, this track could be considered the quintessential Shibuya-kei moment — mixing super fast kitschy American TV instrumentals from the 1950s and 1960s with 1990s dance beats. In this case, the song gets its spritely fun from the Magoo soundtrack and David Seville’s “Gotta Get to Your House” and then adds gabba-like drum fills, tough-as-nails jungle breaks, distorted 909 kicks. Although Cornelius seems particularly interested in drum ’n’ bass the entire records, the actual appearance of jungle breaks does not begin until “Monkey” (one wonders whether Cornelius simply saw a joke in placing his “monkey” within a “jungle.”) The end result is high-energy cartoony frenzy and one of the most enduring timbres of the record.

7. “Star Fruits Surf Rider”
The chaos subsides into the bossa nova pattern on an ancient Maestro drum machine and organ drone bliss of lead single “Star Fruits Surf Rider.” At this point in Fantasma, Cornelius starts to limit the sonic palette, returning to previously introduced sounds and references rather than swirling out into an infinite cornucopia. The cheap drum box and drone come from “Clash,” the intense drum ’n’ bass chorus from “Monkey,” the dreamy breakdowns from “Microdisneycal World Tour.” There are a few new tricks, including deteriorating tape delays that turn into extreme stereo pulses. Certainly viewed as an indie rock track, “Star Fruits Surf Rider” was heavily innovative at the time, taking the Pixies/Nirvana quiet-loud dynamics and re-imagining them with a completely different world of instrumentation. And as the end of Side One — an imaginary boundary for the digital age — the track rewards the listener with a hummable and powerful crescendo.

Despite the drone-y melody, Cornelius is able to make “Star Fruits” the central pillar of the album. He later re-emphasized the importance of this particular track by making it the lead single and releasing a two-vinyl record version (“Blue” and “Green”) that could be played together on two turntables in a mock-quadraphonic manner.

Next time: Fantasma, Side Two

Part Two in a week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ musical masterpiece Fantasma. Read Part One — the introduction to the series as well as “The Age of Music Nerds.”

Part Two: Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma / Fantasma as an Album

Oyamada Keigo before Fantasma

Fantasma looms large in Oyamada Keigo’s legend. Before the album hit, he had already earned a place in Japanese musical history as a young prodigy and respected tastemaker. Through his first band Flipper’s Guitar, he became a god to Japan’s emerging class of indie kids from good families who wanted to indulge in culture that was distinct from society’s increasingly wealthy middle mass. He was not exactly an “underground” icon, however — he did ads for hair mousse brand Uno and thousands of girls in agnès b border shirts would faint at his presence. Upon exiting Flipper’s, he was rewarded with his own sub-label on Polystar called Trattoria that put out his friends’ bands and re-released forgotten Bill Wyman albums no one would be expected to buy (people investing into your certainly-money losing ideas is a true mark of cachet.) Despite achieving this charmed life by his mid-20s, Oyamada still had not established any sort of timeless musical reputation. If Oyamada was a building, he was closer to an immaculately trendy café than a museum.

Flipper’s Guitar — Oyamada’s teenage band, formed with fellow indie prince Ozawa Kenji — had revolutionized the Japanese pop music scene in the very late 1980s by bringing obsessive referencing of unknown British indie bands into the heart of the mainstream market (titles such as “Goodbye, Our Pastels Badges”, “Colour Field,” ad nauseum). Never had Japanese pop music been exposed to such fringe Western influences. And once critics lumped Flipper’s Guitar together with like-minded bands Scha Dara Parr and Pizzicato Five under the crude rubric “Shibuya-kei,” Oyamada and Ozawa became gatekeepers themselves, able to open the door to dozens of more interesting bands who cribbed extensively from Western records known only to 5,000 people worldwide.

Over in Osaka and Western Japan, a truly underground culture had given birth to experimental bands like The Boredoms. Tokyo’s Shibuya-kei revolution, however, developed mostly as an offshoot of consumer culture, revolving around the previously mentioned hipster cachet of reference collection. The Flipper’s Guitar opus thus suffered the natural consequences of this approach: Oyamada and Ozawa were often more interested in rewriting their favorite old songs rather than creating anything that could stand on its own. On their final record Doctor Head’s World Tower — the title celebrating expertise on the Monkees’ 1968 psych-pop film Head — Flipper’s just flat out rerecorded Primal Scream’s “Loaded” as a lyric-heavy pop song called “The Quizmaster.” The vocal melody of Scream’s “Come Together” acted as the verse hook of “Groove Tube.” Track “Aquamarine” is a languid pastiche of My Bloody Valentine’s “Lose My Breath” that drags into the musical equivalent of an Unisom. Sure these timbres and winks were landmark for 1991 Japan (and it’s overall a great record), but Oyamada and Ozawa seemed to be gunning for the title “Kings of Record Store Snobbery” rather than wanting to be recognized as songwriters who pushed melodies into new trajectories and painted brand new sonic landscapes.

After Flipper’s Guitar break up in 1991, Oyamada Keigo spent time producing singles for belle Kahimi Karie and Pizzicato Five’s album Bossa Nova (see Oyamada dance in a fake moustache in their video). Around 1993, he finally rechristened himself “Cornelius,” inspired by a Planet of the Apes TV filmathon. (The same one that apparently inspired Nigo to call his brand A Bathing Ape.) Oyamada’s first album under this moniker, The First Question Award, took nearly three years after Flipper’s dissolved to hit shelves, and despite that distance, it generally felt like a relapse into his old band’s Camera Talk-era pop songs. That’s to say, Oyamada confused himself as a singer-songwriter despite not much track record for original songwriting nor a particularly dynamic voice. He also continued to believe that his “style” of songwriting meant rewriting his favorite songs. The final track “The Love Parade,” for example, is a wholesale and unabashed redo of Roger Nichols and Small Circle of Friends’ “Don’t Take Your Time.” Whether he was determined to sell lots of records to fashionable teens or he fell in way too close to Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu, the first Cornelius album has not aged particularly well. The liner notes to the Fantasma remaster suggest that more people remember the T-shirts that came out to promote First Question Award than the music itself. And in hindsight, nothing on the album really foreshadows what would make up Cornelius’ peak output, except perhaps the Charlton Heston-inspired, spacey lounge house of “Back Door to Heaven.”

Cornelius’ next album 69/96 came out in 1995, with a marketing hype that suggested the Ape had a true epic on his hands. But despite moving to a tougher, rock-based sound, the album suffered again from Oyamada’s confusion of himself as a singer and songwriter. Strongly reacting against his previous incarnation as a beret-wearing, overly-pleasant, moussed-up soft rocker, Cornelius made the choice to photograph himself for the album wearing devil horns.

As an angry simian, Cornelius built 69/96 on giant rock riffs, distorted vocals, and sluggish songs (single “Moon Walk”). The overall effect is not particularly pleasant on the ears, but in the process, Oyamada stumbled upon a big idea: his diversity of musical knowledge could work to push his albums beyond a commercial necessity and into a rumination on the history of pop. In the course of 72-minutes, Cornelius hits doowop, AC/DC-esque FM radio rock, giant Sabbath-y heavy metal, Hawaiian ukelele, ‘60s sitar clichés, G. Love and Special Sauce-like blues harp over breakbeats, classical music, and the sound of waves crashing for a good ten minutes. He is, however, not able to bring these disparate elements into a tight narrative, and the album feels almost infinite in time. The references themselves are also generally mainstream and accessible, making the album feel like a “sell out” by someone who is too lost within the labyrinth of indie music obsession to truly sell out.

69/96 is an interesting mess, but comes off ultimately as an indulgent moment from a label boss who hasn’t found his raison d’être. There are two stand out tracks, however: the mellow bossa nova of “Brand New Season,” which was one of the few pre-Fantasma tracks to end up in the permanent Cornelius live repertoire, and the extra-terrestrial porn grooves of “Rock / 96,” somewhat hidden as second side filler. But he just couldn’t leave the album though without ripping off a classic track — leading to a rewrite of The Beach Boys’ “Little Pad” as the triumphant exit “World’s End Humming (Reprise in Hawaii).”

Both records did not necessarily live up to the cultural impact of Flipper’s Guitar, but neither damaged Cornelius’ god-like aura. 69/69 was near the top hundred of best selling albums in 1995, and his embrace of like-minded T-shirt brand A Bathing Ape helped propel the Ura-Harajuku label into fashion stardom. Oyamada commanded a massive fanbase and a roster of talented junior bands under his direction on Trattoria. He had everything a musician could ever want — other than a killer, moment-defining album.

Fantasma as an Album

The early edition of Cornelius’ third album Fantasma dropped on August 6, 1997, sporting a retro-psych orange-and-white cover and the cryptic titling, “performed by CORNELIUS produced by KEIGO OYAMADA” — splitting the self and alter ego into distinct labor units. Oyamada was 28 years old at the time, a bit older than the Beatles during Sgt. Pepper but generally a good age for churning out one’s best pop music. Trattoria and Polystar staged the album’s release as a pop cultural event complete with radio ads and a TV spot (both included in the remaster boxset DVD).

Just as with Sgt. Pepper, nothing better signals an “incredibly important musical moment” like a meta-concept album. Fantasma is not just a loose collection of songs, but an immaculately-sequenced set of tracks that bleed into, complement, and reference each other. The contrasts between tracks are as meaningful as the similarities. And unlike sonically holistic masterpieces like Radiohead’s Kid A or My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Cornelius maxes out the possible number of sounds, instruments, genres, and musical conventions that could be held in a single silicon disc. Yet a very tight internal logic brings these particular aural expressions together. Despite its extreme diversity, Fantasma is never random. Even the odd sound bursts and feedback drones are perfectly on theme. And like any good concept album, the intention is for a straight listen from the first song to the last, in order, no skipping. Oyamada told Tokion (#6, May/June 1998), “Fantasma is a kind of album that only has one entrance and one exit. That is, you can’t listen to if from the middle. It’s important for Fantasma to be listened to as a whole from start to end.”

If Fantasma is a concept album, then what exactly is the concept? Simply-put, Fantasma is an album about music itself — a tribute to how the very process of hardcore music nerd fandom and collection reference lead to creation and production. Almost every song title references the name of a band (Microdisney, The Music Machine, Clash, Count Five) or a previously-existing song (Primal Scream’s “Star Fruit Surf Rider”, The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”). And lyrics discuss Oyamada’s favorite tunes like The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey.” On Fantasma, Oyamada does not just enact his normal musical protocol but makes a statement about his own artistic philosophy. Even the fancy production tricks appear to be about the act of using fancy production tricks than just employing them to produce a seamless or professional sound.

The emphasis on production and soundscape is further amplified by the general lack of meaningful lyrics throughout the work. Six of the 13 tracks have no lyrics or just rhythmically repetitive wordings. For the other half, Cornelius completely abandons standard pop music lyrical clichés, never touching upon love, heartbreak, etc. There is a palpable lack of human emotion and social relation. We get the story of a “New Music Machine” launched into space by NASA in 2010 that ends up falling apart. “Clash” is vaguely about seeing a band at a club, perhaps The Clash. “Star Fruit Surf Rider”’s lyrical world is somewhere between pot-induced daze and a Murakami Haruki-esque life of lonely wandering, where the only person Oyamada meets on the streets is a cat. In fact, all of the text presents a narrative of solitude — listening to music by yourself, walking around by yourself, humming “Just Like Honey” to yourself. “God Only Knows” contains a solipsistic paradox where Oyamada can believe “I was the only one in the world / who caught a cold.” This all comes together to re-emphasize the overarching, and slightly melancholy, theme of solitary musical collection and study. But more importantly, Cornelius’ de-emphasis of vocals and lyrics — which had historically been perhaps the weakest of his many musical talents — is what allows Fantasma to go far beyond his previous records.

In fact, Oyamada’s vocals feel completely absent for the first burst of the album. The froggy-voiced “Mic Check” itself is oddly credited to Fujiwara Kazumichi rather than the Ape, but even if it is Oyamada who uttered those words, you never hear the former singer-songwriter “sing” anything until the song’s final loops of the word “start” harmonized into a tense chord which resolves into the luscious harp that will become the next track “The Micro Disneycal World Tour.” Oyamada never really takes the lead vocalist helm until the third track “New Music Machine.” Compared with his own oeuvre and that of his closest peers, this was a radical move for Cornelius. With Fantasma, he moved the entire Shibuya-kei needle closer towards experimental peers Buffalo Daughter and future wife Minekawa Takako, and away from the lyrical pop of Love Tambourines and Pizzicato Five. And moreover this was a public burial for any lingering vestiges of Flipper’s Guitar.

In keeping with the idea of music as a lonely pursuit, the album is also meant to be enjoyed in headphones rather than on speakers (or DJ’d at a club). This is explicitly explained on the “Fantasma spot” radio ad as well as hinted to with the special release of the album that included earbuds and came with a sticker that read “Album of the Ear.” Despite this directive for close listening, the album does not indulge in “micro-sounds” per se. Fantasma is wholly dynamic and ear-piercing throughout — with a healthy smattering of giant synth twinkles as if we are to exclaim “my god it’s full of stars” every five minutes. The emphasis on headphones, however, allows Cornelius to express his vision in the emphasis of individual instrumental parts, fragments, and production decisions rather than a general “blend” of sound coming out of speakers to complement and bolster an underlying song. The liner notes to the remaster (written up by Citrus’ Emori Takeaki) mention several times the idea of Fantasma as a “Rube Goldberg machine” — with many moving parts and always on the possible brink of disaster. The headphones give the listener a chance therefore to enjoy the tension between the individual modules performing and the successful race to the end of the track.

Since Cornelius is often referred to as the “Japanese Beck,” we should note here that Beck’s landmark Odelay came out almost exactly a year before, on June 16, 1996. Both Fantasma and Odelay can easily be seen as the two of the greatest late ‘90s records and harbingers for where the rest of the decade would take indie music in its flee from the earnestness of grunge and lo-fi. Sure there is a “Lord Only Knows” on Odelay and a “God Only Knows” on Fantasma, but both are just throwaway Beach Boys references rather than Cornelius’ contemporary borrowing of Beck. (Oyamada had already sampled “God Only Knows” back in 1991 quite prominently on the Flipper’s Guitar track “Dolphin Song.”) The albums otherwise have almost nothing to do with each other. Odelay is a classic American pop record built from loopy breaks and samples but ultimately lyrical and melodic. There is pastiche of ‘60s soft rock, old-school hip-hop, and Exile-era Rolling Stones, but always appropriated with irony.

As we will see below, Fantasma is a much deeper step into the abyss, almost totally abandoning the notion of songs and pushing pastiche so hard that it becomes completely denatured. And as I stated before, Oyamada had established his reference-heavy pop style long before Beck had committed his early weirdo folk grumblings to cassette. Clearly the two men found a kinship once Cornelius went international, but saying that Cornelius “was inspired by Beck” does not adhere to the actual timeline. The closest thing to what Cornelius’ Beck rip-off would sound like is the scratches, synth bass, funk horns, and break-beats of Fantasma outtake “Taylor,” which notably did not make it on the album. And Fantasma, despite its use of tools from electronic and hip-hop music, almost never makes explicit reference to African-American music like Mr. Campbell/Hansen. Cornelius’ drum ’n’ bass is chaotic Futurist noise rather than rasta-inflected jungle.

Next time: Fantasma, Track by Track

A week-long, five part series celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Cornelius’ landmark album Fantasma.

On September 10, 1997, indie rock godfather and ultimate music nerd Oyamada Keigo (小山田圭吾) released the third album for his solo project Cornelius — Fantasma. The album endeavored to be unlike any other in the history of music, taking dozens of genres, references, samples, instruments, and sounds from familiar and unfamiliar sources and fusing them into a completely new sonic world. He succeeded wildly. The album sold extremely well to Cornelius’ long-standing fan base in Japan, and Matador Records in New York released it in the U.S. and Europe to international critical acclaim. Fantasma elevated Oyamada from fashionable pop star to certified musical genius, from domestic icon to global symbol of Japanese creativity. If not for Fantasma, Cornelius would not have remixed global stars like Beck and Sting, become a de facto part of Y.M.O.’s touring band, gigged with Yoko Ono, or collaborated with greats like Arto Lindsay. Fantasma etched Oyamada Keigo’s name into music history and guaranteed that the quirky Shibuya-kei musical scene in Japan would be forever perceived as a legitimate artistic explosion.

In 2010, Warner Bros. Japan — Fantasma’s post-Polystar master rights holder — decided to celebrate Oyamada’s fin de siècle magnum opus with a shiny new mastering job and a box-set re-release (unboxing video). There is not much to say about the remaster itself. Shibuya-kei electronica icon and close Oyamada friend Sunahara Yoshinori gave the recording a thicker bass while keeping the overall volume levels nearly equal to the original. (And for some odd reason the track splits have been relocated for a few songs, at least compared to the Matador release.) This technical aspect is, however, the least important point. The remaster further canonized the album in a national music culture where it is often taboo to award some records historical legacy over others. But if there is a Japanese album to receive the implied veneration of ceremonial re-release, it is certainly Fantasma.

Now at the 15th anniversary of Fantasma’s wide release, we will spend the next few days examining where the album fits within the canon of indie music both in Japan and worldwide, and re-explore it in the context of the decade and a half since its release.

• Part One: The Age of Music Nerds
• Part Two: Oyamada Before Fantasma and Fantasma as an Album
• Part Three: Fantasma, Side One
• Part Four: Fantasma, Side Two
• Part Five: After Fantasma’s Japanese Release

Special thanks to Benny and Connor at Yikes, as well as Ryan Erik Williams and Suzannah Tartan for helping me dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

Part One: The Age of Music Nerds

Since at least the days of Bach and baroque, there have always been music fans and music experts, but not always “music nerds” — arguably a distinct product of late 20th century society. The music nerd is a specific yet now common type of pop music obsessive suffering equally from snobbery and consumerist zeal. They are different from “music aficionados,” who sat in velvet armchairs and enjoyed Beethoven on gramophones, or later, snuck underground to find the most outré forms of jazz in dark New York clubs. The music nerds started to pop up after the introduction of rock’n’roll, when music moved into a popular and explicitly commercial product form. While the old-school Schoenberg snob was an eccentric by his hobby alone, the music nerd was mostly eccentric inside the walls of popular genres and extremely crowded consumer markets. In other words, the nerd strived for personal uniqueness by discovering obscure objects within mass culture rather than beyond it.

The music nerd’s mission often boiled down to listening to what others did not, thus upsetting one of the art’s fundamental tenets. From ancient bone flutes to West African drum circles to jazz cafés to dancing the Charleston in front of blaring Big Bands, music had been a group activity for most of its existence. Music had always been social, yet the music nerd now mostly enjoyed it as a solitary pursuit. Hearing a song in the privacy of one’s own room was not even possible until the early 20th century, and not particularly common until the advent of the small transistor radio, the personal stereo, automobile speakers, and the Walkman. So between this technological change and a corresponding social one wherein pop music rolled over elite musical art forms like opera or ballet, the ingredients were there for the spontaneous genesis of thousands of music nerds. And as music fragmented to an unbelievable degree in the 1980s and 1990s, music nerds became even more intense and even less social.

The music nerd’s deep entrenchment into the collection of obscure albums transformed music from an innocent enjoyment of organized sound into competitive knowledge collection. Music became a form of proto-Pokemon. When two music nerds met, they did not dance together nor sit back and enjoy a mutual passion. Musical dialogue descended into the regurgitation of trivia and long strings of signifiers. Reference became the most valuable currency.

Yet much like the newspaper business and Penthouse magazine, the very 20th-century glass bead game of music nerdism has been ruined by the Internet. Music is now too overly available. The consumerist drive at heart of pop music has deteriorated. The Internet has made every single album of all time available — for free — to anyone who knows how to type the words Rapidshare or Mediafire. Meanwhile Wikipedia provides the Cliff Notes for faking the kind of deep musical knowledge once passed among music fans in strange cant. Nothing can really be “obscure” anymore. Information hyperinflation has wrought the music reference currency worthless.

In hindsight, this collapse of the music market means that the Nineties was the peak of music nerdism. At this time, globalization and technology had reached an ideal level of development for music and music criticism to ramp up the reference game. But there was not yet too much access to render the whole game obsolete. This was conveniently concurrent with the rise of hip hop in mainstream culture, and its backbone of sampling provided one of the greatest canvases known to man for exploring musical reference. By the mid-1990s and the end of primitivist Grunge, the obsession with reference also took over the mostly white “alternative” and indie music, a form most notably explored by Beck, the Beastie Boys, and Stereolab.

There was one other location, however, where it was even more natural for artists to boil down music to its atomic structure of signifiers: Japan. There may be traditional aspects of national philosophy and educational theory that influenced Japanese pop culture’s particularly obsessive mode of learning and understanding, but the artistic practice of detailed study and imitation of form certainly reached its peak with consumer society’s insatiable interest in the West after the War. Youth wanted to do completely alien things like dress like Americans and listen to American music, and magazines had to take up the key role of explaining detail by detail exactly how and why to do such a thing. Holistic sub-cultures like Hippies and Punks got analyzed down to their respective quarks so that Japanese teens could build them back up again from a bunch of imported scraps. These days the otaku nerd gets all the credit for originating Japanese information obsession but this was just a structural outcome of the Japanese model of cultural importation. In the act of bringing one culture over to another, bit by bit, every single possible cultural category becomes a series of consumable lists, and as a logical extension, mastery and memorization of those lists ends up as the most worthy test of true fans, believers, and adherents.

So in the 1990s, what is essentially “signifier music” was at its peak among the international elite, and with Japan’s natural predilection for understanding culture as units of signifiers, we could expect that the global genre’s most greatest creative expressions would come from Japan. And many years before Beck won over Americans with his folk-hop “Loser” anthem, an entire school of music revolving around pastiche, bricolage, sampling, and reference — Shibuya-kei — was already massively popular in its home country. Japan had an edge on this sample and signifier-based pop sound, and therefore it only made sense that the very best Shibuya-kei record would be primed to win the world championship of this wider genre. That record happened to be Fantasma.

Next time: Oyamada before Fantasma and Fantasma as an Album.