Look again

Track three of Point, the new long-player from ex-heavy metal kid, analogue enthusiast, popular music omnivore, Brian Wilson fetishist, gleeful cut-and-paste anarchist and irreverent plunderer of musical traditions Cornelius – is called ‘Smoke’. When he sings the word, however, it gets two syllables: one, as it were, breathed in, and one, most definitely out. “Suh-mooooooke…” It stops being a word, and becomes a wordless expression of jubilance. Suh-moooooke!

Maybe the fact that Cornelius – Keigo Oyamada to his mates – doesn’t speak much English means he is better able to hear the innate musicality of English words than we casual users, that he’s more open to playful onomatopoeia. To hear him talk about ‘Point of View Point,’ however – his own favourite song from his melodic, endlessly surprising, marvellous new second LP Point – he’s more open to most things.

“‘Point of View Point’ turned out to be something that he hadn’t thought of, at all,” Keigo tells me through Ricky, the interpreter. (One of the most disconcerting things about our conversation is that I hear Keigo answering a question animatedly and at great length, and then the answer will come back to us via Ricky in a kind of grey-scale, ‘Just The Facts, M’am’ summary form.)

“When making music, usually, the thought’s down, and he starts playing or recording,” Ricky says. “But when some accidents or mistakes happen, that’s when other thoughts start evolving in the cycle, and that’s when it’s most interesting to him, and most enjoyable. And that happened a lot with ‘Point of View Point’.”

This wilful wrong-end-of-the-kaleidoscope approach is nothing new. Cornelius’ modus operandi has always centred around plucking things out of context and then handing them back to us - stretched, subverted, re-combined with seemingly strange new bedfellows and packaged into perfect neat parcels of unique, ebullient, smile-inducing, highly modern pop – so that we do hear things anew. Some sixty years of popular music were ransacked for previous album Fantasma – most memorably, ‘Star Fruit Surf Rider’ which threaded wistful Beach Boys-ish vocal harmonies over, alternately, plasticky-sweet analogue noises and explosive drum-and-bass.

Point, if less self-conscious of its source material, shares this anything-goes-together approach, and it is probably his organised-chaos vision more fully realised.

Cornelius is, if anything, more prolific as a producer. 1999 brought CM, a compilation of other artists’ songs given a Cornelius re-imagination. CM2 comes out later in 2002 and – when the Avalanches are mentioned in the course of the interview (obvious musical soulmates, to these ears), Ricky says, casually, “Oh, yeah. They’re on CM3.”

In a word, he’s scarifyingly productive.

Fantasma and Point certainly create countless fantasy otherworlds convincingly, but even leaving the music aside, his general work ethic is plainly an anything-is-possible approach. His live shows are not so much technically hyper-modern as fantastical, and tend to involve 3D glasses, additional tracks transmitted to headphone-wearers via radio, and absolutely relentless multimedia. Even his ‘budget’ extravaganzas like his Dublin show of a few years ago, are astounding.

The Olympia’s visual display featured a seizure-inducing barrage of image and visual noise, animation and looped film and numbers, words and flashing colour synchopating in perfect time with the music, as Cornelius himself headbanged away on a (ferocious!) two-headed guitar.

“Yeah! He especially loved that gig,” Ricky reports. “He’s really delighted that you liked that show too. He says it’s true that hardly no-one’s using those guitars these days, but it was useful for him ‘cos he came as a 4-piece band, so it was useful in that sense, as an instrument.” A pause as Keigo snickers something else. “And he also thinks it’s very cool.”

It must be tedious for such an international-minded maverick – more so than most English-speaking artists of similar ilk, in fact – to be asked the degree to which his own Japanese-ness comes into play in his work, but it’s a hard question to ignore. Well?

“He thinks of himself as very Japanese, and has never lived outside Japan. But it’s not an important factor, he just happens to have been born in Japan.”

How important does Keigo feel it is for us to understand his lyrics – most of which, ‘Smoke’ notwithstanding, are not common English words rendered gorgeously unfamiliar, but are in Japanese?

“He says,” Ricky relates eventually, “it’s probably more enjoyable if you can understand the lyrics, but listening to the sounds, and basically getting the images, that’s what music is. Music has words that can’t be put into words. That’s the good part about music.”