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

The First Wave Consolidates

Although a strict interpretation of the Shibuya-kei scene would start and end with Flipper’s Guitar, the words “Shibuya-kei” came to connote the stream of Japanese indiepop following in the original bands’ footsteps. The First Wave had been pioneers in introducing a whole panoply of new sounds to Japanese popular music: UK indie/alternative scenes like anorak pop, neo-acoustic, and Madchester (Flipper’s Guitar), hip hop (Scha Dara Parr), and ’60s softpop and club jazz (Pizzicato Five).

From ’89-’91, these bands had minimal interaction, but once FG was officially disbanded, they began a long history of crossover appearances. Oyamada Keigo produced Pizzicato Five’s 1993 album BOSSA NOVA 2001, which would codify the “Shibuya style” for the next decade as nostalgic borrowing from past sounds mixed with au courant dance beats. Meanwhile, Ozawa Kenji collaborated with SDP to create the 1994 mega-hit “Konya ha bugii bakku“.

The Second Wave

After the breakup, Ozawa and Oyamada took two completely different routes with their solo careers.

Oyamada renamed himself Cornelius and in 1993 put out his debut The First Question Award. The album recalled a friendly, mid-period FG, but took its greatest influence (and hooks) from the hipster rediscovery of Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends. More importantly, he started the sub-label Trattoria on Polystar to release unavailable Western titles in Japan (like Apples in Stereo and Free Design) and kick start the careers of young Japanese indie stars like Bridge (Kaji Hideki‘s original band), Citrus, Seagull Screaming, Kiss Her, Kiss Her, and many others. Oyamada also produced some of his then girlfriend Kahimi Karie‘s first work and repaid his debt to Salon Music by adding them to the Trattoria roster. Regardless of his plunge into the shallows of the underground, Oyamada was still a bone fide rockstar. In 1993, he could be seen in the inside cover of magazines doing ads for the Uno brand of hair mousse.

In stark contrast, Ozawa went straight-up J-Pop, scoring a string of big hits and even appearing on the ultra-conservative NHK New Years’ variety show Kouhaku Uta Gassen. Core Flipper’s fans followed Ozawa’s work devotionally, but he essentially left the indie world and no longer influenced the Japanese underground music scene. If FG was the Beatles, Ozawa was Wings.

A host of new bands also joined the informal movement in the mid-early ’90s: Venus Peter (discovered by Oyamada and produced by Salon Music’s Yoshida), Love Tambourines (on Takemi Kenji’s influential Crue-l label) , the rap-pop act Tokyo No. 1 Soulset (discovered by Oyamada), and Original Love (ex-Pizzicato Five vocalist Tajima Takao). Dee-lite’s Towa Tei came back to Japan from New York in the mid-’90s, and although he was regarded as a pioneer and antecedent to Shibuya-kei, the sound of his solo releases resembled the movement’s signature style enough to imply a loose membership. Denki Groove were more of a dance-humor-pop act, but there was great crossover between fans of Shibuya-kei and their work.

Cornelius’ second album — the heavy metal/hip hop-influenced 69/96 — was released in 1995 and is still his best selling record to date. Kahimi Karie scored some big hits on the Oricon charts like “Good Morning World” with the Scottish producer/songwriter Momus on board.

Shibuya-kei fashion had been strictly Continental dandy, but starting around 1995, Oyamada’s close relation to the fashion director Nigo and his brand A Bathing Ape brought the indie-fashion world of Ura-Harajuku into the indie music world of Shibuya-kei. Both men had supposedly stumbled upon an obsession with Planet of the Apes at the same exact moment in 1993 — collaboration was inevitable. Soon after meeting, Bape was making tour T-shirts for Cornelius, and until around 2002, Oyamada always dressed head-to-toe in the brand for official appearances.

The Third Wave

By the late ’90s, the Shibuya-kei bands had become so ubiquitous that the term no longer implied any sort of rebellious alternative to the mainstream. Their influence had permeated society, and massive big budget projects like the Puffy and My Little Lover were obviously taking notes from the indiepop playbook.

However, the term “Shibuya-kei” still served as a convenient way to describe the new acts working in a similar style. The German label Bungalow Records‘ massively well-received Japanese “clubpop” compilation Sushi 4004 directly codified the featured bands as “Shibuya-kei.”

New additions to the scene were Naka Masashi’s Escalator Records group: Yukari Fresh, Cubismo Grafico, Neil and Iraiza, and later, Naka’s own Losfeld. Also, Oh! Penelope — the reincarnation of ex-J-Rockers Shijin no Chi — put out one album of dead-on Shibuya-sound ’60s tributes (Milk&Cookies) and earned a tenuous place on the stage. Ex-Fancy Face Groovy Name and Ozawa girlfriend Minekawa Takako came aboard with her bedroom analog synth concoctions. Psych-out turntabling krautrockers Buffalo Daugher also were lumped in. Ex-Denki Groove’s Sunahara Yoshinori (aka Marin)’s amazing concept album Take Off and Landing took the Shibuya-kei sound into the air with an electronic tribute to Pan Am jetset culture.

Pizzicato Five’s Konishi Yasuharu meanwhile started his own label Readymade and released works by the lounge/dance DJs Tanaka Tomoyuki (Fantastic Plastic Machine), Ikeda Masanori (Mansfield), and latin beat fanatic Comoestas Yaegashi. The label even tried to construct a revisionist “Shibuya-kei” past through their Good Night Tokyo and Midnight Tokyo collections of groovy tracks from the ’60s.

Cornelius’s masterpiece Fantasma came out in 1997 and can be said to be the culmination of the scene’s sound. The album is a seamless trip through a well-curated collection of music-nerd influences — hip hop, turntabling, High Llamas, My Bloody Valentine, ’70s punk, the Music Machine, cartoon soundtracks, drum’n’bass, Primal Scream, the Beach Boys, sampling, Apples in Stereo, retro-futurism, Bach, Disneyland, the Jesus and Mary Chain, drugs, theremin, and Cornelius self-references.

By the end of the decade, the term “Shibuya-kei” had snowballed and snowballed to a point where it almost included any and all anti-mainstream sounds that fit a specific mukokuseki internationalist aesthetic. It was no longer a canonized musical style, but an attitude — a devotion to sophistication, a penchant for reference and pastiche, an anti-Jpop stance, and an unwavering attention to design and detail. However, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the rest of Japan also scooped up these trends, and the mainstream use of the Shibuya-kei ingredients softened the impact and meaning of the indie rebellion.

Continued in Part Four