DISCOVERY CHANNELS
Jul 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
TIME TRAVELING
Record shopping is a serious pastime in Tokyo — a reality that might go some distance toward explaining the uncanny diversity of modern Japanese pop in general. For Cornelius, though, becoming a music junkie through crate digging was only part of the equation; both of his parents played music throughout his childhood — he later recruited his father's band to perform on the remix companion to the leftfield album 69/96 (Trattoria/Polystar, 1995) — and by the time he was in high school, he had picked up the guitar as his main instrument.
With such an extensive musical background, Cornelius usually writes all his own material, but on that rare occasion when he reaches back for a song to cover, his choices can be far-out to say the least. Fantasma's “2010” paid tribute to an obscure singer's rendition of Bach from the '60s, while Point's “Brazil” was an all-electronic instrumental of the 60-year-old classic song “Aquarela do Brasil.”
Sensuous, of course, is not without its thoughtfully chosen and well-wrought cover song, and therein lies a story. “My father became ill and was in the hospital,” Cornelius recalls, “and one day I got curious and went looking through his record collection. I found Frank Sinatra's Only the Lonely, which is this great album of standards he did from 1958. There was one song on there that I really liked, so I thought I'd give it a try.”
The song in question is “Sleep Warm,” a whimsical late-night ballad that vividly emulates some of the Moog and ARP synth sounds of early '70s Stevie Wonder, with Cornelius manipulating his lead vocal through Antares Auto-Tune to create a vocoder-ish vibration. “I wanted to segue out of the song before it,” he explains, referring to the funky bossa nova called simply “Music,” which fades out on a repeating synth pulse that cycles through gradually thickening layers of compression, “because I wanted to create the feeling that you're going into another world. By the time you realize the change has happened, you're in a completely different space.”
WIDE OPEN ROAD
For some artists who write, record and produce music almost entirely on their own, the prospect of presenting that music in a live setting can be a daunting one — especially if the bulk of an album was created electronically. Cornelius' use of mostly organic instruments allows him to avoid the pitfalls of his original intentions getting lost in translation, but he also isn't constricted to the point where he feels obligated to slavishly reproduce live what he created in the studio.
“When I'm playing live,” he says, “it's impossible to translate exactly what's happening on the album because I'm doing it with a four-piece band. But I really enjoy the freedom of being able to do that live. It's more exciting to me to think about the possibility that something new and different could happen with the music on any given night.”
As a live spectacle, the Cornelius Group — which features drummer Yuko Araki, bassist Hirotaka “Shimmy” Shimizu (who both also play together with guitarist Yukio “Nago” Nagoshi as Ash-Ray) and keyboardist Hirohira Horie — is a force to be reckoned with. Along with his trademark Fender guitars, Cornelius will often hit the stage with a theremin and a Pioneer DVJ-X1, which he uses to manipulate the bizarre live-action sequences — assembled by director Koichiro Tsujikawa — that run on a large screen behind the band. The performance is rendered even more interactive when a homemade box loaded with button-triggered vocal samples starts to make its way among the audience; Cornelius always encourages participation in his music, which is probably why he is so keenly attentive to how it sounds before it reaches your ears.
“It's somewhat similar to the importance of lyrics to music,” he explains. “I feel that the vibration of each sound — its origin and its texture — has to come out clearly. But like I've said, for this album, I didn't want to impose any rules on myself. That's the great thing about music — the possibilities. There are just so many paths that it can take, and I think there will always be many more in the future.”
SENSUAL MACHINES
Tokyo's funky Nakameguro district — just southwest of the record-shopping mecca of Shibuya and the flashing neon lights of Shinjuku — is fast becoming the place to see and be seen among the city's cutting-edge art and fashion crowd. Tucked away in one of the neighborhood's serpentine streets is Cornelius' stripped-down but efficiently stocked recording studio, which brims with a womblike warmth that seems to have seeped by osmosis into the lush soundscapes and lilting grooves of Sensuous.
“It's not that living in the city has influenced my music so much,” Cornelius says, when asked if his work is a reflection of — or a response to — the teeming bustle of Tokyo. “For me, it's really more about the whole environment. What I experience, what the weather might be, what I ate that day — all of that has an influence on how I make music. There are also quite a few people who influence me musically, but there's no one specific I could name; when I'm writing in the studio, it's more about what strikes me at that particular moment and whether I think it works musically.”
From a technical standpoint, Sensuous marks the first time that Cornelius has mixed an album entirely inside the box — in this case, with an Digidesign Pro Tools|HD system. “When I made Fantasma,” he says, “I was sampling all kinds of sounds and using Pro Tools, but with an SSL board — I recorded everything on 48 tracks to digital tape. I went a bit more digital on Point, but I still used a lot of outboard gear, and I also mixed on an SSL. But this time around, there was no sampling — everything was tracked live at 24-bit, 96 kHz resolution — and because the quality of the sound in Pro Tools has gotten so much better, I just decided to mix the whole thing in the computer.”
Computer, DAW, recording hardware
Apple Power Mac G5 dual 1.8 GHz computer
Digidesign Pro Tools|HD with 96 I/O interfaces
Software, plug-ins
Antares Auto-Tune 5
Apple Logic Platinum (with ES1, ES2 and Sculpture soft synths)
Native Instruments FM7
Instruments
1963 Fender Jazzmaster guitar
1973 Fender Stratocaster guitar
MusicMan Sabre bass
CD turntable, DJ mixer, drum machine
Korg KM-2 Kaoss Mixer
Pioneer CDJ-1000 CD turntable
Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm drum machine
Microphones, preamp, compressor
AKG C414 condenser mic
Neve Portico 5016 mic preamp
Røde NTK tube mic
Urei 1176 compressor
Studio monitors
Genelec 1032As
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