Oyamada Keigo (aka Cornelius) began his successful musical career at an early age, with the junior high school band Lollipop Sonic. He went on to form the influential Flipper’s Guitar with fellow Lollipop Sonic bandmate, Ozawa Kenji.
After the breakup of Flipper’s Guitar in 1991, Oyamada formed his own record label, Trattoria, which has released a wide variety of bands on its label. He also began a lucrative career, which continues today, doing mixes for artists ranging from Beck to Kahimi Karie to Sting.
Oyamada resurfaced in solo form under the moniker Cornelius, with the enormously successful and very influential "Fantasma" in 1998. The album showcased what Oyamada was truly excellent at, using the studio as a musical instrument. The album represented the most successful melding of indie pop to date, with the kind of sample, loop, and backbeat, point-and-click tom-foolery that Pro Tools and computers made possible and which Oyamada had explored on the later works of Flipper's Guitar. The abrupt changes, the random sampling, with the melodies and beats... The album crystallized the feeling of the late 90s Japan, with its heady and hodge-podge of pop culture influences, and disposability. Everything just seemed right.
Cornelius is not the only Shibuya-kei artist, nor did he solely pioneer the style. But he did popularize it. Following the release of "Fantasma", every band and their mother began playing the sound, a sound which continues to heavily inspire modern Japanese music and foreign music.
A less talked about aspect of Oyamada's life is his love life, a fertile one that helped launch the careers of Kahimi Karie and Minekawa Takako (with whom he now has a baby). For a variety of reasons, Oyamada was a major force (if not the force) behind a new and fertile Japanese music scene that emerged in the 90s. Though the scene has cooled and bands and people moved on, Oyamada included, the music and the scene that he helped create continues to be an inspiration for many Japanese bands, and the starting point for understanding contemporary Japanese music.
The latest works of Oyamada continue to evolve along ever more anti-pop, experimental, cut and paste lines. Directly opposing his earliest works, which were very much pop-oriented, Oyamada seems to be trying to either reinvent his past or destroy it.
SCENE: Tokyo
GENRE: Indie rock/pop (Shibuya-kei)
WORKS:
Fantasma 1998
FM
CM
Point
WEBSITE:
http://www.monitorpop.com/cornelius_old/biography.html a biography and discography by a fan with an interview on the site.