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Cornelius — English-speaking adult chimpanzee, Trattoria sound
honcho, and shiny pop-cultural icon Keigo Oyamada — has some of
the fanciest fingers in the modern world of modern music. Using the
studio as musical tool, and using this tool as a tool of precision,
Cornelius makes music in the same way so many lonely men in the
lonely lectro world do. But the results that come from his
one-man-studio-borne, conceptually-briefed and
arranged-to-within-an-inch-of-their-life exercises in audio are
hardly the austere stuff of the abstract-electro realm's boys'-club
intelligentsia. Full, fun, silly and foppishly flipping through
the big book of musical genres with more flagrant whim and
self-conscious study than a Beck record, Cornelius' symphonies to
op-shop soundtracks, beachside harmonies, pop-cultural kitsch,
cut-'n'-paste techniques and the hoary notion of the "journey through
music" are so prettily preened, so utterly pompous as they
perambulate through so much grand-scale scenes-and-scenery, scaling
grand heights of longplaying recording as the tracks ship from one
shore to the next, the dexterously spun jumbles of played sounds so
stylishly pulling off their conceitedly conceived, most magnanimous
magnificence, that all you can really do is sit back and politely
applaud. Point, subtitled "from Nakameguro to Everywhere," is
Cornelius' latest such journey, following on in the same steps from
the silly spun sonics and fantastic-voyage frolics that made
69/96 and Fantasma such lauded larks. One could mention
the developments from the second-to-last record to the last record to
this, but pulling out threads of different strains of sewn-in
influence could easily unravel the woven wonder of each whole. And
Cornelius discs are made whole, for hearing, for sure.
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