Cornelius

For more than three decades, Cornelius has occupied a singular space in contemporary music. The long-running project of Japanese musician, producer and composer Keigo Oyamada, Cornelius emerged in the early 1990s following the dissolution of Tokyo pop group Flipper’s Guitar, before becoming one of the most distinctive and forward-thinking names in modern experimental pop. International breakthrough Fantasma (1997) established Oyamada as a restless sonic architect, stitching together psychedelic pop, electronic music, musique concrète, hip hop and avant-garde composition into something playful, hyper-detailed and impossible to pin down. The album became a cult touchstone, while subsequent releases including Point and Sensuous further expanded his intricate, cinematic sound. Alongside his own records, Oyamada has collaborated with artists including Blur, Beck, MGMT, James Brown and Yoko Ono, while his precision-synchronised live shows have long blurred the line between concert and audiovisual installation. Nearly three decades later, Fantasma B-side “Typewrite Lesson” has also found a new generation of listeners, recently going viral on TikTok and receiving support from artists including Rosalía. Yet 'REFRACTIONS' feels less like a continuation than the beginning of another transformation. Written between 2024 and the end of 2025, the album explores ideas of perception, shifting realities, memory and interconnected consciousness, not through overt narrative but through structure, texture and movement itself. “As the world and my surroundings changed at an intense speed, I think all of that inevitably shaped this work,” Oyamada explains. “Rather than expressing these ideas directly, I approached them structurally — exploring continuity, transformation, and multiple coexisting states within a single, uninterrupted flow of time.” That sense of fluidity runs throughout 'REFRACTIONS'. Songs dissolve and reform, melodies appear like half-remembered signals before…