W. David Marx shares lessons from the front lines of licensing 100 images from various Japanese individuals and institutions for his upcoming book on Japanese fashion.

Disclaimer: Very sadly, we are not lawyers, so always consult with your publisher’s legal team or other counsel when making final decisions on image usage. The following article is merely intended to provide general thoughts and guidelines.

Writing about fashion requires visuals, so for my book Ametora: How Japan Saved American Fashion (Basic Books, Fall 2015!), my publisher and I planned on having around 60 images. I ended up finding more than 100 suitable ones, and we ended up using more than 80.

While the publisher helped foot the bill for the image rights, I was responsible for arranging the licensing. In other words, I had to go out and do the legwork to secure the rights for every single one. This took about five months of emails, phone calls, and faxes, but to my surprise, most everyone was happy to grant me rights. In fact, the only explicit “no” came from a famed Japanese electronics company who hilariously did not want me using a 40 year-old advertisement for a boombox because they could not clear the “portraiture rights” of the models whose faces you could not even see anyway.

Seeing that Néojaponisme readers are the type of people likely to write books that require licensing images in Japan, I thought I would pass on everything I learned in the last six months.

Prerequisites for Image Licensing in Japan

First, you need proof that you’re working on a legitimate production — i.e., the name of a publisher, date of publication, title of work, etc.

Second, make yourself a basic template in Japanese that explains what you are working on, so that you can just cut and paste your requests. Even if you do not need it for the initial email, they will ask for it, so just have it ready to go. My form had: book title, paragraph about book’s theme (with heavy name dropping on whom I interviewed), book format, number of Images, publication date, blurb about the publisher, and blurb about me.

Third, you need to prepare yourself (or a trusted associate) to do a lot of phone calls in Japanese — including cold calls to random individuals.

Images Sources

1. Photo Agencies

The easiest place to license photographs in Japan is the newspapers and wire services (prices below are for black-and-white photos, color are often more than ¥20,000.)

• Asahi — ¥7,000
• Mainichi — ¥6,480
• Yomiuri — ¥12,800
• Kyodo — ¥7,000
• Jiji — ¥6,000

Yomiuri is the most expensive, but oddly, seems to have the fewest number of photos. Asahi and Mainichi are particularly easy to sign up for.

There are also a few high-end photo agencies you can use. Aflo has a lot of great images that you will not see elsewhere, as they also manage individual collections of a lot of famous photographers.

• Amana – ¥21,600
• Aflo — ¥20,000

Getty is not Japan-focused, but can be useful for finding photos of Japanese celebrities when abroad.

There is an application process for licensing photos on these sites, but it is nearly automatic for any legitimate publication. Once they approved, they just send the image download links over email. Based on price and ease, any image search should start with these agencies.

2. Individual Photographers

For all other images, you will need to reach out to the photographer who took the photos. This includes photos inside magazines — the photographer, rather than the publisher, owns the copyright. The photographer maintains copyright for 50 years after death, so even if they are deceased, you will need to reach out to the family to get rights.

Fees on old photos are highly variable. Sometimes I was not charged for using the old photos, one time I paid ¥30,000, the most of any photo I licensed.

Finding widows and children seems difficult except that there is an organization called the Japan Professional Photographers Society who are happy to pass on contact information for a photographer or next-of-kin. Yes, it will be an awkward call when you ask the son of a deceased photographer to ask to find negatives from fifty years ago, but there really is no other way to do it. Expect to do some faxing too. Also note that some famous photographers are not part of the Society.

For personal or family photographs, most people do not charge but you do need to secure permissions.

3. Illustrations

Illustrations work the same way as photographs — illustrators retain rights to their images used in magazines. There is an illustrators’ society called the Japan Illustrators’ Association, but I did not use them. To find one illustrator, I had to contact a tailor he did work for many years ago, beg for a phone number, and then have the conversation with the illustrator’s wife that started as, “So in 1989 your husband did a piece in Hot Dog Press…”

Also, there are no standard prices for illustrations, so you have to negotiate. For most of the ones in my book, the illustration itself was an important historical marker of style (rather than eye candy), so the illustrators gave me lower prices.

4. Magazine Covers

Most publishers will let you use these for free but you need permission. One publisher I dealt with normally charges for use of covers in Japanese media but gave me a pass because I was referencing it in a semi-academic work.

5. Magazine pages

Reprinting magazine pages is a gray area that depends on the publisher. Copyright on magazine pages is not cut-and-dry, and as far as I could deduce, publishers are very unlikely to actually own copyright on all the content in the pages. Each person responsible — the writer, the illustrator, the photographer, the advertiser — owns their own copyrights for the material.

So it comes down to case-by-case usage: One publisher told me that I could basically use anything as long as I referenced it as a “visual quotation” (i.e. fair use). Another publisher told me that the magazine I was referencing no longer existed and they did not care how I used anything (and then hung up on me.)

One major publisher said the only thing off-limits was when pages use non-Japanese models, as they sometimes have deals that their images are not used outside of Japan.

Managing Risk

Japan is often said to be a “low risk” society, and this mindset sometimes becomes a barrier to licensing images. Many rights holders or parties involved may simply reject a licensing request because there is some risk — albeit extremely low — of a future lawsuit. Here are a few additional things that you will have to think about but will come down to managing risk.

Portraiture Rights
The primary uncertainty when licensing photos in Japan is so-called “portraiture rights” (肖像権, shōzōken). From my limited legal understanding, this is not a right explicitly guaranteed by Japanese law, but people over the years have been able to sue under basic constitutional personal rights protections when they can prove damage from someone publishing an image of them without consent.

Celebrities are the most likely to sue over portraiture rights because they can claim that the publication is using their likeness to promote the book or otherwise damage their reputation. Normal people, however, can and have sued before. The most obvious case would be a photographer taking an unauthorized street snap of a young man in a terrible outfit which goes online to have commenters savage his outfit and identify his name. But what about someone whose photo was taken fifty years ago for a fashion magazine and listed as a particularly stylish person?

Knowing that there is always some risk of a lawsuit, rights agencies license you a photo and then tell you that it is your responsibility to “clear” the portraiture rights for anyone in the photo. But just imagine for a second what this task entails when the photo is twelve young men from 1964 in a shot of Ginza.

It bears repeating that I am not a lawyer, but there are some commonsense ways to lower potential risk: (1) not use images of people in a way that denigrates them or could seem damaging (2) do not use images of celebrities on the cover without permission (3) make sure the text references the images so that you can show there was a “fair use” context for using the image. Fair use does not exist in Japanese law, but it will still help your case if you are able to show that the image was critical for illustrating the narrative rather than just “eye candy.”

There are different laws on portraiture rights depending on which country you publish, so always consult with your publisher’s legal team before making any decision.

Also note that in one case I did not need to pay a licensing fee to a photographer for the use of a photo, but I did have to pay a small fee for “portraiture rights” to the estate of the person in the photo.

Orphan Works
If you are writing a history and want to show images illustrating historical moments, you will definitely uncover many great images that are essentially “orphan” works. The photographer or illustrator may be unlisted or unreachable; it may be an advertisement from a company that no longer exists.

Using these images opens you up to some level of legal risk, so you have to make a decision weighing the risk involved.

The Japanese government recently has changed the law to ease the licensing burden when all copyright owners cannot be located, but this only extends to certain trusted organizations, which we are guessing, you are not part of. This seems to signal, however, a liberalization of copyright towards orphan works.

Public Domain
Any photo or illustration where the creator passed away more than fifty years ago (that’s now 1965!) is now in the public domain. Have fun.

The “regent” pompadour has been the go-to hairstyle for Japanese delinquents for more than eight decades. W. David Marx looks at how the infamous coiffure got its pseudo-English name and morphed from slick imitation of British royalty to fluffy blond biker parody.

In Japanese, the riizento (リーゼント) — written in English as “regent” — describes a men’s hairstyle where the sides are slicked back and top is left long and put up over the head in a pompadour. The term encompasses anything from the refined look of Ginza cocktail bartenders to the wild do’s of Hamburg-era Beatles and the exaggerated quiff of Kishidan’s Show Ayanocozey. But whatever the particular example, the regent has always been a powerful symbol of social defiance in Japan.

Despite the regent’s long-standing infamy, the hairstyle’s history is mostly undocumented in Japan. Many mysteries remain. First there is the origin of the name. The consonants in the katakana — “riizento” rather than “riijento” — suggest a pre-war coinage. Then there is the process of the regent’s evolution: How exactly did it go from a pomade-heavy gentleman’s look to the favorite of motorcycle gangs festooned with right-wing slogans?

The following essay hopes to explain the regent’s storied history, and in the process, get a glimpse into how delinquent culture developed in Japan during the post-war period.

The Pre-War Regent

During the late 1920s, the streets of Tokyo’s modern Ginza neighborhood swarmed with stylish youth. The mobo (“modern boy”) wore stylized suits with wide-leg pants, and their moga (“modern girl”) companions who mixed Western and Japanese dress. For their coiffure, the mobo slicked hair back with pomade in a look called the “all-back” (ōru bakku).

In 1933, Tokyo’s modern barbers hunted for the next look for modern gentlemen. An enterprising hairstylist in Ginza came up with a style where he slicked back the sides to the back of the head and then pushed the front up like a traditional takashimada bride. Looking for an exciting foreign name, the barber called it “the regent.” (1)

There are multiple theories of why the barber chose the word “regent.” Most believe it referred to “Regent Street” in London — either standing in for the spirit of British commerce or because the curve of the street resembled how the hair curved around the side of the head. The question is whether a Japanese barber in 1933 — a time when only the country’s very elite traveled overseas — would have known that Regent Street is curved.

Another theory is that the hairstyle is modeled after Edward VIII, who was not technically a “prince regent” but often performed the duties of his ill father George V. The Japanese regent did echo Edward’s hair relatively well. Further evidence of this link is an article about the regent in a 1936 issue of the Japanese barber periodical Nihon Riyō Tsūshin that includes a photo of Edward VIII upon his ascendance to King.

Whatever the case, the word “regent” — which pre-war katakana turned into riizento — played with an idealized vision of high-class British style. The hairstyle was the favorite of modern boys at dance halls as well as celebrities such as singer and comedian Kenichi Enomoto. Ginza barber Masuda Ekikichi further perfected the regent by iron-perming hair to better lay flat after being slicked back.

As the war with China amplified in the 1930s and Japan descended into military dictatorship, the Imperialist government prescribed short, battle-ready hairstyles for the nation’s young men. The regent became a target for suppression — not just for its length and wasteful use of pomade but also for its foreign name. Posters went up in barber shops requesting, “Gentlemen, please stop wearing long regents. Let’s appropriately cut out the excessive fuss. The conservation of supplies comes first!” (2). The true deathknell of the regent, however, was not government mandate but wartime scarcity. Once pomade became unavailable in the early 1940s, the look completely disappeared.

Post-war

Japan emerged from the war in 1945 as a devastated, impoverished country occupied by a foreign army. But at least men were free to wear whatever hairstyles they pleased. As imported pomade appeared for sale in black markets like Ameyoko in 1947, the regent came back in style — the favorite of jazz musicians, bartenders, and gangsters.

A few rebellious teenagers sick of short-cropped hair and army buzz cuts also adopted the regent. They wanted to look like the glamorous stars they remembered from their youth. Called pejoratively apure (from the French term for the post-war, après-guerre), these teens dressed in imitations of American soldiers — un-tucked Hawaiian “aloha” shirts, rubber-soled shoes, and General MacArthur-style aviator sunglasses. Parents hated the ideas of teens regent not just due to its associations with the demi-monde but also for the idea that young men would waste money on expensive black market pomade rather than buy food for their families.

The timing of this 1947 revival is most interesting for the fact that the Japanese regent predates both the British “quiff” popularized by the Teddy Boy movement and the American boom for the pompadour accompanying Elvis Presley and James Dean’s stardom.

When Ishihara Shintarō’s hit novel and then film Season of the Sun brought the Sun Tribe (Taiyō-zoku) into vogue in 1955, affluent young men started wearing their hair shorter in imitation of Ishihara and his brother Yūjirō. The greasy regent managed to stay alive, however, in lower class circles — the “mambo” dance scene of 1955, hosts at night clubs, and yakuza. Similar groups in the countryside learned to love the regent when the Rockabilly fad of 1958 put Mickey Curtis, Masaaki Hirao, and Keijiro Yamashita on TV. Their floppy, vertical imitation of Elvis’ pompadour re-established the regent as a more wild look — and broke it out of its origin as a flat, slick hairstyle.

By the early 1960s and the start of middle-class youth consumer culture, the regent died off; it too vividly symbolized post-war delinquency. Yet the look re-emerged around 1966 as the leading hairstyle of the sukaman (“Yokosuka mambo”)— lower-class youth who hung around with American Navy seamen in Yokosuka and Yokota. With most rural white soldiers in buzzcuts, the sukaman found inspiration in their regents from black soldiers and soul musicians like James Brown. This resurgence only tarnished the regent further with a low class reputation: Go-gos and dance clubs in Tokyo proper explicitly called out on posters “No sunglasses, no regents .” The sukaman found this inconvenient but this only reinforced their own preference of the look for its clear power of defiance.

Bikers and rock’n’roll

In 1972, musician Yazawa Eikichi formed the back-to-basics rock band Carol inspired by the Beatles’ days as a workhorse R&B band on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Also conscious of the Roxy Music-inspired 1950s revival in the U.K., Carol guitarist Johnny Ōkura dressed the band in menacing black leather jackets and leather pants — as well as hair in greasy long regents. Carol used a similarly-attired biker gang called Cools as security at their concerts, who later formed their own musical group.

Trendy members of the Tokyo creative classes loved Carol and wore their hair in regents in the vein of British Teddy Boy-revival counterparts. Once the brand Cream Soda set up shop in Harajuku to sell Fifties fashion in 1975, teenagers from across classes congregated in the neighborhood dressed like extras straight out of the film American Graffiti. The most extreme were the Rollers — men and women who dressed up in Fifties gear and danced around a boom box to “At the Hop.” Men wore regents — mostly refined into ducktails in imitation of 1950s Americans — and they wore them high and greasy.

In the countryside, Yazawa had an even greater influence on culture. He became the main fashion inspiration for early bōsōzoku teenager biker gangs. These working-class delinquent teens liked perms and did not go for precision combing, so their attempts at regents ended up using very little pomade. The slides were slicked back slightly but the top just went up and flopped around. As bōsōzoku became a national phenomenon, this new evolution of the regent became a useful symbol of illegal youth behavior. (The best visual reference on the web for this early look is the documentary God Speed You, Black Emperor.)

Self-Parody

“When you imagine ‘yankii hairstyle,’ the first thing that floats into your mind is the regent, right?’ asks 2009’s handbook for provincial delinquent style, Yankii Daishūgō. The word “yankii” describes the wider subculture of working-class delinquents — essentially, bōsōzoku without bikes. As rock’n’roll fashion disappeared from Harajuku in the early 1980s, the regent remained in Japan exclusively as a yankii hairstyle — floppy and high, not greasy and flat.

During the early 1980s, yankii fashion had a moment in the spotlight between the popularity of band Yokohama Ginbae (“ツッパリHigh School Rock’n Roll”) and the Nameneko cats. The regent was the signature style. Compared to the pomade look of Fifties revival types, the yankii would use a hairdryer and a skeleton brush to tease up the hair into a V above the head. For further defiance of school rules, teens would bleach their regents into an ochre shade. The regent’s height above the head defined social status among delinquents; No one dared have a regent higher than the banchō head bully. (3)

This hardcore yankii look faded into obscurity by the mid-1980s, but manga such as Be-Bop High School canonized the regent as the yankii’s most definitive symbol. With subsequent revivals of bōsōzoku and Rollers, the regents kept getting higher and higher. At this point, any links to the original regents of 1930s Ginza gentlemen had been completely lost — it was simply an element of teenage rebellion. When the band Kishidan emerged in the early 2000s, leader Show Ayanocozey wore one of the most exaggerated regents ever to both celebrate and parody yankii culture.

Today, the yankii regent casts a long shadow over the hairstyle’s history, but this allows it to retain its status as the clearest marker of youth rebellion. For outside observers, the regent acts as a useful metaphor for how foreign culture enters and evolves in Japan. The original term hoped to imitate upper-class British style, but now the regent has become disembodied from its source. Those who wear regents most often connect it to Japanese style leaders like Yazawa and yankii bosses rather than London businessmen, the Beatles, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. The regent’s roots in the West are now irrelevant — it is perhaps Japan’s most original hairstyle.

ENDNOTES:
(1) Masuda, Eikichi. Rekishi kara Mita Gendai no Heā-Fasshon (Contemporary Hairstyles as Seen From History). Zenkoku Riyō Kankyō EIsei Dōgyō Kumiai Renḡokai, 1972. p.71-72
(2) My translation of a quote from a placard in Tokyo’s Barber Museum.
(3) Yankii Daishūgō (Big Yankii Collection). East Press, 2009. p.55

General sources
• Mabuchi, Kōsuke. “Zoku”-tachi no Sengoshi (The Post-War History of the Tribes). Sanseido, 1989.
• Nanba, Kōji. Yankii shinkaron (The Evolution of Yankii). Kōbunsha, 2009.
• Yankii Bunkaron josetsu. (An Introduction to Yankii Studies). Ed. Tarō Igarashi. Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009.

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