![]() ![]() A while back, I first got into a band called Polysics (elecropunk+new wave, very catchy and fun). On another note, I just heard my first-ever Plastics album, and I was wondering if you could shed some light on a puzzle I'm having. There certainly is a lot of warmth in the singles, and I can only hope the rest of the album is as loving, I certainly have no problem with electronica, as long as it's done with heart (Girls Tape Store, PINE*am, Hi-Posi, I'm smiling in your general direction). I've commented before that ever since Fantasma, all I've been waiting for is "the next Fantasma", and while it sounds like this certainly won't be it, it at least sounds like it's a step in the right direction, maybe some kind of warm middle ground between the bursting, enthusiastic, sonic namedropping of Fantasma, and the stark, overplanned electronica of Point. I think I understand what you're saying, and I find great comfort in it. The music feels good, man, if you open your mind to the emptiness at its centre. The world is melting into a tidy billion bubbles, pixels, points, or "flagments". I don't know if Keigo has ever taken acid, but when I listen to his music I feel like I have. I get an impression of great freedom glimpsed through a tight grid (which is, it seems to me, a quintessentially Japanese idea), a sense of a window being opened. There's always something "Day in the Life"-ish about Cornelius's music and surrounding concepts, as if a scale, a single note on the piano, or a chord transition could blow our minds, or as if ultimate wisdom were contained in the sound of an air bell chiming in his studio. Sensuous is a touching, humane record (we sense Keigo's love for his son Milo in the traffic crossing drill song or "Sleep Warm"), and the checkered math-paper exactitude of its slightly-too-tight-assed funk is more than compensated by a sense of Beatles-ish awe. "Like a Rolling Stone" should be called "Like Music for Airports" - it is "Music for Airports". Reminds me slightly of "Silviphobia" (forthcoming O.LAMM masterpiece), but not as interesting structurally "Omstart" is foggy-folky, pulsing guitar strings, 60s hippy-dippy spiritual Time signatures are impossibly complex, proggy No suprise that The Books have remixed this they share his hedge-clipping tidiness Now here's the obligatory fast clipped rock throb ("Gum") There really is sensuality in Cornelius's love of pattern play The record should be called "More Pointillisme"Ī scale or an arpeggio becomes a minimalist pattern, with light and colour Nice "unnatural" transitions between the spacily resonant and the bone dry Lyrics based on a road crossing drill for his son Not so much math rock as math funk-jazz, clipped and controlled Robotic Beach Boys poured over Fagen and Becker Here are the notes I scribbled while giving the album a first listen: ![]() Correction: there's a lovely synthetic larynx cover of the Dean Martin standard "Sleep Warm", which serves the same function here as "Brazil" did on "Point" - to remind us that songs exist, and are great, and wouldn't it be nice if Cornelius would actually bother to write some?īut what makes Sensuous compelling is the ideas, and there are lots of those. There really isn't a single proper song on the record, though. Well, a kind little bird sent me the whole of the Sensuous album today, and I must say I like the rest of it better than these two singles. The video is nice enough: an unfeasibly large bubble floats above a children's playground, wobbling before it pops. Since the "bathos" of the first single, there's been another, Breezin', which I have to confess I find as uninspiring, sonically, as "Music". What's exciting about his work is the ideas, the packaging, the marketing, the design. Like Hajime Tachibana of The Plastics, Eye Yamataka of the Boredoms or Konishi from Pizzicato 5, Cornelius is a brilliant editor, a polymath, a conceptualist, a designer. The one minute TV advert he's put together for his new album Sensuous ("Sensuous Flagments", as it's billed on YouTube) is fascinating and elegantly conceptual - like pretty much everything he does. His website, for instance, is invariably intriguing. Basically, I preferred the video to the song.Īnd yet, despite finding Cornelius' music often rather arid and academic, I still place him high in the constellation of the world's most interesting music artists, mainly because of his mastery of everything that surrounds music, the empty centre of his work. I drew the paper's attention to A Bathos Ape, the piece I'd written about his disappointing comeback single "Music". It isn't really polite in Japan to express ambivalence in your press comments, yet ambivalence is what I feel when it comes to Cornelius' music. Last month, when the Tokyo Times approached me to write a 700 word sidebar for a proposed feature on Cornelius, I didn't immediately jump at the opportunity. ![]()
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