A new DJ mix to capture the best of a vintage Nineties Japanese dance music sound. Think of it as retromania for retromania.

Thanks to the international success of Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, and Towa Tei, the loosely-defined, decade-spanning Nineties indie music movement known as Shibuya-kei has been one of Japan’s most influential cultural exports. The last fifteen years, however, have been unkind to the genre, as the movement’s originators abandoned its signature sound and pleaded for distance from the terminology. No one ever liked being pigeonholed under the dated term “Shibuya-kei” in the first place, but once the trend was over and its cachet depleted, artists wanted a chance to be themselves without all the SK-related baggage.

But here we are nearly 25 years after Shibuya-kei’s birth, and its eclecticism once again stands out on a global stage, this time as an antidote to the globalized factory-made pop monotony of the Twenty-Tens. Yet the musicians’ œuvres are partially buried under the sands of time, and knowledge of the genre’s hidden gems are locked in the heads of obsessive former young people (and in the bargain bins of provincial used record store dumps with pages on Yahoo! Auction). The time has been right for a new mix that showcases, celebrates, and reintroduces the best tracks from Shibuya-kei’s peak years. So here we are: The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One.

While many would identify 1993-1995 as Shibuya-kei’s shining moment in the sun — an era where Pizzicato Five’s “Sweet Soul Revue” and Kahimi Karie’s “Good Morning World” were pop chart hits — the genre crystallized as a dance music movement much later in the decade. “The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One” prioritizes beats over melodies, and the best beats popped up around 1998-2001 with the emergence of Readymade Records (Pizzicato Five, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Mansfield) and Escalator Records (Cubismo Grafico, Losfeld) as well as later followers in the 21st century such as Halfby. As a nod to deep connections to a wider international movement, the mix also includes a few key foreign artists who were either directly linked to the Shibuya-kei movement (Dimitri from Paris) or otherwise took heavy influence (Ursula 1000). Most dance music genres hover around a specific BPM range, but Shibuya-kei’s ravenous consumption of global rhythms stretches the tracks across the scale, from hip-hop to house to breakbeats all the way up to speedy bossa nova, samba, and drum’n’bass.

The mix, like Shibuya-kei itself, is designed to seamlessly flow through what otherwise would be disparate and discordant sounds. There are symphonic strings, jazz riffs, groovy bass lines, yé-yé rips, Hammond solos, digitally-degraded funk samples, vocoders, saxophones, MiniMoogs, turntable scratches, old-school rap toasts, bongos, acoustic guitar strums, a surprising amount of mambo, Lollapalooza melodies, dinky electro synths, jazz scat, schoolyard chants, whisper raps, Twilight Zone tones, Amen breaks, 909 hats, lyrical references to Jeremy Scott, and samples spanning from Scritti Politti, Sesso Matto, Bobby Valentín, and Buddy Rich, to Hair Goes Latin.

With so much freedom, maybe the better question is, what isn’t Shibuya-kei? The groups employed a punk D.I.Y. attitude but do not sound like “rock.” The electronic elements would never be confused with techno. Shibuya-kei is often “dumb” like Brighton big beat but too subtle and feminine to have been part of that boys club. The genre shares with trip-hop a love of rare samples but is bright and chipper in spirit. Artists dipped their toes into disco, Latin house, and downtempo but never fully subsumed the seriousness. The songs are too cartoonish and hyper to play in boutique hotel lobbies.

One clear thread is retro aesthetics — a love for the sounds of the past. Shibuya-kei was a hyperextension of sampling culture into the pop realm, whether actual stolen loops or simply perfect pastiche layered on top of elements alien to the original songs. The artists mostly looked to the 1960s but stole nearly anything from the past canon of independent music. Pizzicato Five always kept the horns and space-age bachelor pad sweeps but over time moved from house beats to drum’n’bass.

Another trait is the obsession with obscurity. Shibuya-kei artists seemed motivated to make music in order to further distinguish themselves from other music snobs. They worshipped the deepest cratedigging that never sampled or referenced sogs that could be heard accidentally as standard-issue background music. They listened to the Mondo Music catalog cover to cover. Compare them to inferior sub-Shibuya-kei groups in 1990s J-Pop like My Little Lover who took the production techniques but just sampled things we’ve all heard — Michael Jackson, Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles. Shibuya-kei, at its best, took all of its phrases from “musicians’ musicians” and LPs that would have otherwise been forgotten to the ages.

This love of discovery is perhaps the most attractive element of Shibuya-kei at the moment, when so many young creators — bored with the over-information of the Internet Age — no longer find allure in re-serving lost treasures from the past. So many artists are complacent to go again and again to the same soft-synth preset patches that sound exactly like the year in which we live (and somehow not that different from a decade ago). The specific sounds of 1990s Shibuya-kei can be thrown away but the genre possesses a potentially timeless methodology. There is magic born in a ruthless pursuit of rule-breaking beat-swapping, maniacal one-upsmanship. And this mix, The Best of Shibuya-kei, Volume One attempts to capture that sound.

Note for Trainspotters: I cut up and re-edited most of these tracks, some would say with great violence. For the song selection, there is a bit of overlap with some of the era’s best mixes (e.g. Spinout) but I prioritized lining up the most representative and highest quality songs rather than worrying that we’ve heard too much of Montparnasse’s “Hugo.” (Maybe we have, but there is a reason that song is on so many mixes.)

For more on the topic, read our six-part series, The Legacy of Shibuya-kei.

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part five of a five-part series, covering the band’s final years and post-breakup releases.

Happy End of You (February 1998)
	A remix album that never came out in Japan, which perhaps explains the selection of foreign producers. This is mostly a time capsule of late 1990s IDM/electronica, but a few things hold up, namely The Automator and Saint Etienne’s respective remixes of “Love’s Theme” and some of the drum’n’bass. Dimitri from Paris’ “Contact” old school house is fun, but out of place. The rest is, in most cases, literally just noise.
(Cswee) — Taking the loungecore out of loungecore

Playboy Playgirl (October 1998)
	Here we begin the final, mature years of Pizzicato Five, a period in which the band finds a unique, yet timeless sound rooted in 1960s analog with the speed of late 1990s electronic music. The album starts with the excellent “La Dépression” — a cheery joke about Japan’s own economic despair. And then we get to Konishi’s great weakness in sequencing his own albums, forcing the least exciting song into the prime #2 spot; in this case, the boring “Rolls Royce” goes on for eight full minutes. The band recovers with “A New Song,” P5’s best use of the moog synthesizer in a bright and shiny Hugo Montenegro pastiche. Other interesting sound experiments include the mega-blown out mixes of “Weekend” and “The Great Invitations,” the Austin Powers trend convergence of “Playboy Playgirl,” and minimal stutter snare of “Such a Beautiful Girl Like You.” If you remove the skits, this is one of the more consistently good efforts and a sound for the ages.
(A) — The groovy, moogy Pizzicato Five we should all remember

Darlin′ of Discotheque e.p. (April 1999)
	Is there a more fitting symbol of Konishian excess than an eleven minute version of “Darlin’ of Discotheque”? Except, what if those eleven minutes were incredible? The sampled drum breaks, the foreboding strings, and a strong melody building slowly to justify the time spent? Other songs on this also pay off: “Barbie Dolls” is a classic, and “Tout Tout Ma Cherie” is the Michel Polnareff cover P5 was always poised to tackle.
(A-) — The hits keep coming all the way to the finish line

Nonstop to Tokyo e.p. (July 1999)
	A few months later, another EP. “Non-Stop to Tokyo” itself is one of the band’s weaker singles, and “Room Service” sounds too much like an early demo of “20th Century Girl.” The real treasure is “Bossa Nova 3003,” which like “Lesson 3003 (Part 1),” are canon-wide mashups where P5 took the Double Dee and Steinski model and applied it to themselves (a fitting act for a meta-band like Pizzicato Five.) “Mademoiselle” oddly sounds like Sweet Pizzicato Five era house act.
(B) — Interesting moments in otherwise excess

PIZZICATO FIVE (November 1999)
	This most certainly should have been the band’s swan song: P5 at its most mature, most adult. Konishi removed almost all explicit synth/dance music references for a relaxed, organic sound based on a treasure box of 1960s jazz and Yé-Yé samples. The result is as if Konishi took revenge upon Couples… and won! (There is even a superior Nomiya “cover” of “Serial Stories.”) “20th Century Girl” is a keeper, and I wish that “Goodbye Baby & Amen” would have been the band’s final musical moments. The American-release “Fifth Release from Matador” (note all the overflowing enthusiasm in that album title) is basically identical with some original versions of songs replacing Konishi’s odd remixes.
(A-) — What should have been P5’s final, grand statement

REMIXES 2000 (March 2000)
	As far as remix albums go, this one may be the strongest, with a gaggle of producers from Konishi’s own lineage: Mansfield, Cubismo Grafico, Comoestas, and Sunaga Tatsuo. There is no weird electronic violence, just Shibuya-kei on Shibuya-kei. Even Iwamura Manabu’s meta-jazz works on “Roma” better than his own work.
(B) — The sound of the Shibuya-kei dance pop peak

Voyage à Tokyo ep (September 2000)
	And so begins the end. Here we get You the Rock rapping over Pizzicato Five and a weird mashup on “Les Grandes Vacances.” This is not an important EP but at least holds up compared to the dreck that follows.
(B-) — The gruel gets thinner, with a hip-hop influence

Çà Et Là Du Japon (January 2001)
	This record is really, really, really, really terrible. Just complete dreck. I could maybe extract some good quotes from the lyrics of “Fashion People” (Nigo!) for a nonfiction book, and I am partial to the mambo-beats of 1960s cover “In America” but the rest is beyond cheesy — like a “JAPAN COOL” poster hanging in a provincial gift shop selling salty green tea. By taking Japan as a theme, Konishi produces a recursive error, like the scene where John Malkovich goes into his own head. Pizzicato Five throw all taste and class out the window and just go “Kimono” and “Sukiyaki Song” until you want to burn every album in their entire catalog. The only non-arguable bright side is the extension of Happy End’s throwaway “AIEUO” hiragana syllabary ditty into a fully fledged Disney symphonic song for the ages. An ignoble ending for the band, and probably not a coincidence that Nomiya Maki barely appears on the songs.
(D) — An Orientalist failure for masters of mukokuseki Internationalism

Pizzicato Five in the mix (December 2001)
	A DJ mix… claimed to be a “live” mix by Sunaga Tatsuo, but sounds computer-edited, and also, doesn’t really sound like a “live DJ mix.” The beginning hits on the house-y, club side of the band, but by the middle we’re on to the remarkably non-danceable “Triste” and a acoustic version of “The Night is Still Young.” For a band in constant need of editing, mixes can be a nice way to enjoy the catalog, but this one is overall unfocused and has no compelling narrative.
(C+) — Some random P5 songs in a random order.

pizzicato five I love you (March 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Pizzicato Five’s most mellow songs hand-picked by Konishi? Okay, I admit, I didn’t listen to this album. I confused it with the one below. But looking at the track list, this is a very strange selection from the catalog: drowsy songs that a very tired Konishi perhaps looked back fondly upon in his old age.
(C+) — Some random mellow P5 songs that Konishi happens to like

pizzicato five we love you (March 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Pizzicato Five’s most poppy songs? On first listen, I thought this was a waste of time. But as a Greatest Pop Hits — removing all of the band’s more experimental and dance oriented works — the songs shine through. The selection cuts out all the filler and reveals the band to have been masters of songcraft over a full decade.
(B+) — Nothing new, but a helpful distillation of the P5 pop sense

pizzicato five we dig you (May 2006)
	A DJ mix… of Japan’s DJs and producers mashing up the best of Pizzicato Five into a non-stop mega-mix in the vein of 2 Many DJs? Yes, please, that would be excellent. But that is not what this is. This is an hour of listening to your favorite three-second fragments of P5 songs linked up stochastically with very few moments of clever blending or recontextualization. Handsomeboy Technique schools everyone at the very end by making a song you actually want to listen to more than zero times.
(D) — The best Pizzicato songs mashed into formless oblivion

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. This is part two of a five-part series, covering the band’s first eight releases.

“Audrey Hepburn Complex” (August 1985)
	Pizzicato V debuted as one of many “YMO children” on the Non STANDARD label. And as such, producer Hosono Haruomi (of Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra) roughed up P5’s dainty vocals, dainty melodies, and references to dainty 1950s cinema icon Audrey Hepburn with clackety drum machines, dissonant piano chords, and proggy structural complications. (No organic instruments were harmed in the production of this record.) The title song would function well as background music in a B-grade American 1980s film where the protagonist is walking town feeling tortured. On the brighter side, Hosono also brought us the delightfully wispy synth lines that carry both the Simon & Garfunkel cover “The 59th Street Bridge Song” and the vaguely-Hawaiian “Let’s Go Away for a While.” But no matter how solid the songs, the production never emerges from the gray fog of early 1980s New Wave.
(B+) — A dated Eighties sound, but an auspicious start

“From Party to Party” (October 1985)
	A Christmas-themed dance song relying on high-speed drum machine hi-hats, 1960s surf guitar, and James Bond ambience. In case you worried about commitment to the holiday theme, there is a vibraphone solo that morphs into “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Not a particularly important track in the band’s history, but musicologists will be able to dredge up elements of “Twiggy Twiggy” in the primordial swamp.
(B) — A demented Christmas song

“In Action” (January 1986)
	Although Hosono is still listed as producer, Konishi and co. managed to escape YMO’s exclusively electronic cell. “Action Painting” gets one step closer to the classic Pizzicato Five — bouncy piano-driven Motown-inspired vocal pop. But the sound is still buried under grey ‘80s reverb and fake synth horn stabs. “Boy Meets Girl” meanwhile is full out moody New Wave: primitive drum machines lacking any nuance, slap bass samples, fairy synths, and digital replicas of steel pan sequenced into rococo solos. A relatively robotic extreme for P5.
(B+) — Exactly as if 1990s P5 were transported back to the 1980s

Couples (April 1987)
	Whether it was their new record label Sony or an old obsession with Roger Nichols & The Small Circle of Friends, Pizzicato Five decided on a collection of soft vocal pop for their first full-length album. They evidently sought out a cozy studio with no synthesizers and very comfortable couches. The result is a Bubble economy version of easy listening, equivalent to one of the song titles on the album: “Two Sleepy People.” There are occasional flashes of energy from Tom Jones pastiche, but otherwise, many flute flourishes and whispers for bedtime. Surely it was strange for a Japanese band in 1987 to make a 1960s muzak album with nods to Walter Wanderley and Sergio Mendes, but they had yet realized there could be danger in mining for forgotten lounge sounds.
(B-) — Whispery sweet nothings for your nap date at the trendy café

Bellissima! (September 1988)
	At Sony’s request, P5 fired singer Sasaki Mamiko, so Konishi went out to request the services of Tajima Takao, male vocalist of J-blue-eyed-soul band Original Love. Pizzicato Five, Attempt Two bares little resemblance to the previous incarnation. No more manic pixie girls: Tajima belts out smooth invitations straight to the bedroom over upbeat, funky, and organic sounds from real life musicians. By the second track “Temptation Talk,” it is unclear this album has anything to do with the indie music of Hosono and Non STANDARD. At its worst, this is Terence Trent D’Arby, but even at its best: Tony Bennett? Trivia: You will recognize the song “Couples” from its melody’s re-use in “Baby Love Child.”
(C) — Maybe the least canonical true album: dated, cheesy, unrelated

On Her Majesty’s Request (July 1989)
	Konishi felt that Bellissima! was “too serious,” so on the second album with Tajima, the mission was to keep the male singer but bring back the levity of their past songs. The opening instrumental track “Holiday for Audrey H.” achieves this through trumpet solos and hyper-speed harpsichord, foreshadowing their later work. There still may be too much vibraphone, but synthesized beats replace the jazz drumming to reintroduce a sense of speed. “Bellissima ‘90” and “T V A G” are both solid J-pop songs with rock footing, and the latter brings back a few New Wave elements plus a Buffalo Springfield melody reference. Konishi and co. offer a fun suite of songs under fake film soundtrack “Except from the music for film ‘EROTICA Operation,” and then “Satellite Hour” makes club pop from Fairlight vocal samples — thanks to a guest duet with future singer Maki Nomiya. Lowlights are the Tajima-penned funk-lite.
(B-) — Music gravitates back to Konishi’s strengths, but scattered

Soft Landing On the Moon (May 1990)
	With this compilation of reworked old songs and outtakes, the band inched towards the peak Pizzicato Five sound. But progress is a slog. The new version of “Party Joke” adds a more sophisticated loungecore to their list of capabilities, but then why do we need a hard rock cover of “Bellissima” or a Soul II Soul-esque remix of “Temptation Talk”? Maybe we don’t. A funny moment is the guest voice-over appearance from Sasaki Mamiko to imply that she’s cool with being kicked out of the group. Overall, there are more pronounced club beats and drum loops, and hey, there’s even a Ohtaki Eiichi cover for good measure. But any album where we have to hear Tajima sing a song called “Sex Machine” just doesn’t hold up in the long-run.
(C) — All the worst parts of the Tajima years, but even less essential

Hi, guys! Let me teach you(May 1991)
	A throwaway collection of cheesy instrumentals for use in an educational TV show. Tajima is gone, but the muddily-mixed live band sound lives on. The entire CD sounds like hack musicians at a TV station trying to rip off Pizzicato Five’s 1960s retro but coming up with the worst genres of the past: flute muzak, Ventures instrumentals, and dentist office bossa nova. By the time a harmonica steps in to play the melody lines, you want this root canal to end. A small charm: The song “Matt Dillon ni naritai” (I want to be Matt Dillon) gets the absurd English title “I’ll see ya guys on saturday night, right?” Otherwise, avoid.
(F) — A cheesy take on the most boring side of P5

Part Two: The Nomiya Maki Years 1991-1993

W. David Marx listened to every single major release from legendary Shibuya-kei band, Pizzicato Five, so you don’t have to. Here are his thoughts over a five-part series.

I always took Pizzicato Five for granted. When I started listening to Japanese music in the late 1990s, there was almost nothing available in the U.S. — except Pizzicato Five. When I started hunting for rare Shibuya-kei vinyl in 2000 across Japanese RECOfans and disk unions, there was rarely what I was looking for but there was always a giant stash of Pizzicato Five. Whether it was their long tenure, ubiquity, or the comically long discography, Pizzicato Five records felt like a commodity. One of the last P5 things I ever bought was called “In the Bag,” and it was literally a bag of Pizzicato Five records.

But now with some distance, I cannot think of a Japanese band who achieved more memorable and innovative songs than Pizzicato Five. We can argue on quality, but P5 wins quantity hands down: There are more great P5 songs than there are Happy End or Flipper’s Guitar songs total.

And yet the band’s legacy is not a settled issue. They were not a “serious” group in terms of content or timbre, they released too much material, and the quality went off a cliff at the very end. On the other hand, they were the most consistent and driving force of the Shibuya-kei movement and pioneered a sound that no one outside of Japan ever replicated with the same skill. Pizzicato Five invented a new methodology that yielded incredible results: laying bright new melodies on top of devalued and forgotten 1960s junk — Bacharach, film soundtracks, French Yé-Yé, Donovan — with drum samples and dance floor beats.

And this brings us back to the main barrier for Pizzicato Five fandom, whether new or old: the band’s prolificacy. There are way too many albums and EPs. Fortunately I have been in a mood for what I call “systematic listening” (close listening to music catalogs of certain artists or genres in chronological order), and so I decided to listen to (basically) the entire Pizzicato Five discography and report back on my findings.

Rules and Resources

I listened to every album that was not a greatest hits album rehashing old music, and I listened to every EP that was not just a single with a nearly identical remix. I skipped “promo releases.” If there is something major I overlooked, feel free to pester me until I add it.

I use English names of albums.

A few web pages were vital to my effort:

• Ted Mills song-by-song Pizzicato Five discography
• Mark Wasiel’s defunct Pizzicato Five discography
• A page of solid Japanese language reviews

And thank you to Jean Snow who delivered some hard-to-find EPs and provided spiritual guidance through the long process. I also may have ripped off both the American school system and Robert Christgau for the scoring system.

Four parts

• Pre-Canon 1985-1991
• Canon 1991-1993
• Canon 1994-1997
• Canon and Posthumous 1998-2006

Cheat Sheet: Pizzicato Five’s Best Five Albums

1. Bossa Nova 2001 (1993)
2. Happy End of the World (1998)
3. This Year’s Girl (1991)
4. Overdose (1994)
5. Playboy Playgirl (1999)

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.