Make Believe Mailer 82: "Dream In Dream"

A Review Of Cornelius' First Album In Six Years...And First After An Olympic Mess

Keigo Oyamada rejects the outside world on Dream In Dream. His latest album as Cornelius and first original full-length in six years finds the creator gazing inward — he’s reflecting on love lost and found, turning emotions both always on his mind and blindsiding him, pondering the transience of all and his own inevitable death. When he trips over images of the present, they simply become triggers to bring some buried memory or fear to the forefront. He’s in his head.

There’s one moment, though, where Oyamada jolts ever-so-slightly out of this daze. “Sparks¹” chugs ahead on guitar recalling his early 2000s highlights, with Oyamada himself keeping up with his words rather than letting them take the lead. It’s about a long buried memory suddenly rushing back to mental view, with all of the emotions locked away with it exploding once again. It’s ultimately in line with the themes on Dream, but delivered as a broadside. It’s also the rare instance Dream comes close to grazing how Cornelius got here.

Of course Oyamada would want to recede from the modern world’s view, after the last two years of his life. He was brought onboard to compose music for the Tokyo 2020 (nee 2021) Olympic and Paralympic Opening Ceremonies, after the COVID-19 shook up the creative team for the event and lead to a creative designer quitting for having the whackest ideas imaginable.

Just before the start of the Games, though, a 1994 and 1995 interview Oyamada did with ROCKIN’ON JAPAN and Quick Japan respectively where he bragged about extreme bullying he inflicted on a disabled classmate. This — coupled with the internet’s long-boiling anger at the Olympics in general coupled with other Opening Ceremony scandals — turned into a classic bit of Twitter outrage that soon grew bigger than one social network. Oyamada resigned in the days leading up to the show, before vanishing from public view as best he could. Yet the fallout forced him to pull out of music festivals, led to an album from the electronic supergroup he took part in METAFIVE to be shelved, lost his job soundtracking an NHK kids show about design, and generally saw his image sullied.

Besides being a whole to-do on its own, the incident also forced music fans and writers to reckon with one of the most critically celebrated and culturally influential creators in Japan’s history, and how this scandal² changed the way we listen to “Star Fruits Surf Rider” and assessed Shibuya-kei, among other topics (here’s my effort at grappling with it). For a while, it. seemed like a classic case of an artist’s unsavory past crashing into their present and sinking their future.

I think that’s where the Western press left the story, but they missed out on the second chapter that still sort of leaves me dizzy. By September 2021, Oyamada talked with weekly tabloid Shukan Bunshun, offering more context to the interviews and shifting blame towards the music journalists of the ‘90s and a culture of over-the-top-ness. Then, livestreaming channel Dommune aired a nearly two-hour-and-a-half program called “Keigo Oyamada (Cornelius) Truth of Events,” even translated into English months later. If you have any interest in Cornelius, how this scandal was covered, media in Japan in general during the social platform age, or a fascinating look at how concepts like “cancel culture” get filtered in Japan, I recommend at least skimming it³. It also signaled a shift. “Heading towards 2022, we’d like to bring back his life as a musician,” one panelist says midway through.

Well, that happened! Oyamada resumed activities in 2022, appearing at that year’s edition of Fuji Rock before putting on further shows. While late, that METAFIVE album did come out (though the group ended in the process). Earlier this year, Cornelius played festivals in Australia and Thailand, with plenty more in Japan ahead along with a solo tour behind Dream In Dream.⁴

He even soft-tested the album last summer by sharing “Kawaru Kieru,” a song (below) featuring lyrics written by Shintaro Sakamoto and eventually serving as the opener on Dream (in English as “Change And Vanish”).

The only element missing? Oyamada, still not ready to go to the front, and in this first version he recruits Mei Ehara to handle the vocal. It’s his voice all over Dream a year later…but I’m still not sold that he really wants to be out front like he used to.

Dream doubles down on everything introduced on Mellow Waves, an album where Oyamada first truly confronted getting older. He hasn’t found peace on this front, and rather sounds more nudged off center by human realities. Six years ago, opener “If You’re Here” zoned in specifically on the power one other person could hold over someone’s feelings, their presence bringing comfort and their absence bringing blankness. “Change And Vanish” burbles to life and explores similar terrain, with sweet words about talking to each other like how kids play games. But it’s undercut by a sudden worry about all of that vanishing (“If there’s someone you love / better see them quickly,” he sings, his voice echoing off like he’s already fading away).

This unease hangs over Dream, and is delivered as unsubtly as possible via song titles like “Mirage,” “All Things Must Pass⁵.” Oyamada told Brooklyn Vegan the latter both nods to a personal favorite George Harrison song from close friend Yukihiro Takahashi, who died earlier this year, while also exploring the Buddhist idea of impermanence. That’s a useful perspective, as so many of the songs here have a mantra-like quality to them, with repeated phrases and a focus on nature. “Drifts” is pure state-of-mind transcription, the closest he’s come to New Age in his career.

What’s missing is a perspective beyond the self. Dream’s lyrics almost always concern themselves with Oyamada’s fear of death and what happens to him…and his legacy…after it. This permeated Mellow Waves too, but Oyamada had fun with it back then, which in turn revealed much more interesting dimensions to his art. Sure, he fretted about leaving the living, but he framed it as a message written to some future music listener coming across his work…in the obvious hope that even when gone, his songs could help him stay alive (“Dear Future Person”).

Then there’s Dream in a 2016 chrysalis “In A Dream,” hinting at the headier places Cornelius would eventually get to. Yet back then, Oyamada seemed to be constructing an actual sonic dream, complete with lyrics embracing a space-explorer motif that worked partially as a metaphor for self-realization…but was also just kind of trippy, especially when paired with the sputtering electronics around it. He’s never that fanciful on Dream, with his images simpler and his sounds more grounded.

Cornelius has always let listeners into his head. His masterpiece, Fantasma, still does this better than anything else, spilling out his musical dreams of Brian Wilson, obscure bossa nova, The Apples In Stereo, goofy sound effects records and so much more into one album. Point playfully imagines music as building blocks, while Sensuous mentally twists those same toys into like, tubes and plastic ladders and little light-up robots. Hell, Mellow Waves is about getting old, but even then Oyamada offered a peak into how he was rethinking the way words and sounds could interact…and still finding the juice to create dynamic soundscapes.

It’s the music lacking most on Dream, settling for simplicity and indulging in personal nostalgia while leaving room for all this worrying. Oyamada remains curious in the studio — the edges of songs fizz, little details like a bird chirping off adds some depth to the otherwise placid instrumental “Too Pure,” he’s not afraid to let a bunch of noise just bubble up in the middle of a song — but this time around it can often feel like a production choice without greater significance. There’s lots of percussive rattling and blips on “Out of Time” while “Mirage” looses up a bit late for a digi burst...but the center is Oyamada just turning thoughts over at mid-tempo, daydreaming off from the sounds around him. It’s…content.

The best moments tend to be nods to Oyamada’s own past, whether the speedy rock of “Sparks” or the woozy funk of “Night Heron,” a tipsier relative to Sensuous’ “Wataridori” (both birds in the title, give away). Even look backs, though, can feel staid, as seven-minute-plus electronic collage “Dream In The Mist” (reminding of last album’s “Surfing On Mind Wave Pt. 2”) reminds as it runs out of sonic showstoppers and peters out for most of its backend. Oyamada isn’t interested in venturing too far off from the sound he’s crafted, but the glimpses of experimentation make me want to hear him step out of his comfort zone again…for a few seconds at the start of “Environmental,” it sounds like he’s going full Henry Kawahara in conjuring up an imagined New Age jungle. Then…he lays down some chunky electronics and talks about feeling better after a rainstorm, all intrigue vanished, save for a brief return at the end.

Dream positions the thoughts of Oyamada into the center, but keeps the artist at arm’s length. He’s turned inward, and that’s fine, but while he’s OK probing his life fears, the music here just doesn’t sound as interested in working with his words. Oyamada once built musical Rube Goldberg machines, but with Dream he created something closer to a lava lamp. It reveals new shapes, but at its own pace, with the numbers and creator in no rush, soaking everything in as we watch from a distance.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies (though lolz how long is this going to last)

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1. I’ll be using the official English titles for this review.

2. I actually think the lasting legacy of all this in Japan is that it foreshadowed the 2023 reckoning with Johnny Kitagawa’s alleged legacy of sexual assault against minors. Like the charges associated with the Johnny & Associates’ founder, Oyamada’s bullying has been out in the open for years and easy to find, and something that did always pop up in corners online when he had new music or landed some sweet new commercial opportunity. It just never became a big deal until the world’s eyes drifted to Japan and, whoops, there’s Cornelius in the spotlight, now is the time to actually confront this.

3. Another telling bit of previewing where we are at now — this Dommune presentation spends a large chunk of time focused on criticizing how the media handled all of this, with fair and unfair criticism in my personal opinion. But this is also a huge part of the Kitagawa story in 2023 — the mainstream media’s failure to actually address this.

4. I’m tempted to say this hasn’t happened in U.S. music or media based on the rollout of the album…at time of writing there’s one review courtesy of Slant and an “interview” with Brooklyn Vegan closer to an Oyamada-penned essay. I wouldn’t blame editors for being skittish about having to face this…you see all that honkin’ context I had to lay out?…but I also thought…what if interest has just shifted, and would have regardless? The much-covered Mellow Waves came out six yers ago, which might as well be six decades in modern music media terms. Being involved in a global incident that had Bill Maher taking your side doesn’t help, but maybe he’s just reached that point in his career.

5. There’s definitely part of me that, while writing this, is thinking…is this secretly about the Olympic stuff? It lines up pretty well…