Cornelius Interview
FANTASMA" has been reissued on Matador Records and a Cornelius remix album "CM : FM", featuring remixes and contributions from BECK, DAMON ALBARN, MONEY MARK, Buffalo Daughter, SEAN O'HAGAN and UNKLE, has already been released.

Cornelius is Keigo Oyamada. An Cornelius has a tendency to paint his musical fantasy in theme park proportions:

"When I play I like to create an atmosphere like Disneyland. It's all about creating an atmosphere, creating my own world."

The recent album Fantasma is part collage, part dreamscape, part electronic sketch-pad. Influences are everywhere from Mozart to Planet of the Apes (Cornelius was the intelligent, sensitive ape) to Pet Sounds.

Comic, curiously landscaped,breathless, surreal, the album is the sound of a man pulling the strings of a cross-genre puppet and breathing life back into body of pop psychedelia. It's crazy and mixed up yes, but it's never without deliberate and mindful structure. The obvious parallels, however, to Brian Wilson are convincingly destroyed by Keigo's unwillingless to always please on a melodic level.

"I really like Brian Wilson and "PET SOUNDS" in particular and have been influenced by him in many ways, but I think that "FANTASMA" is similar to a more perfected version of "Smile" maybe. I don't just enjoy the Beach Boys for what they are, I also enjoy people who enjoy the Beach Boys. People like Sean O'Hagan (The High Llamas) who play on the album. More importantly, my musical inspiration comes from life itself. If there's a TV on in one room or a thumping drum 'n' bass CD next door, if they somehow synch together they become the inspiration."

Keigo, the son of a Hawaiian slide guitarist, rose from Tokyo's pop quarter in the Shibuya district. Since the conception of Cornelius in the early-Nineties, he has sold well over half a million records in Japan.

At a recent concert played to 20,000 people at the Budokan, headsets playing extra rhythm tracks transmitted from a local radio station and 3D glasses to enhance the onstage visuals were offered to the audience.

Dazed by media overload soem people were reduced to tears.

At a recent show in New York we were spellbound by the harmony of visuals and sounds."Again it's all about the atmosphere. I take a lot of pleasure in the lights and syncronised videos, but my main focus is always on the music. I want to perform a good show for the people that come out to see us. Touring is fun. Going to so many new places and experiencing new things are interesting. My music is influenced from going to all these places. It is global. I suppose music in general has become more global. But it could be a lot more global."

Rumour/myth has it that Keigo's own label Trattoria has released a Linford Christie version of "Keep On Running" and Bill Wyman's entire back-catalogue.

Don't you monkey with the monkey. It could well be true.