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 refracting into new shapes, while acoustic instrumentation, digital manipulation and spectral electronics coexist in constantly shifting balance. At times intimate and weightless; elsewhere disorienting and densely layered, the album feels like fragments of parallel realities briefly overlapping.
The album also marks a move outward. Where previous records such as Mellow Waves and Dream In Dream often carried a solitary, inward-facing quality, Refractions was consciously shaped through collaboration and exchange.
“This time, instead of turning inward, I wanted to open the work through interaction with others,” says Oyamada. “I’ve come to feel more strongly that reality is not something completed within oneself, but something shaped through relationships and exchanges.” Among those collaborators is longtime friend Sean Ono Lennon, who contributes lyrics and vocals to lead single “Aeons”. Their creative relationship stretches back to the late 1990s, when Oyamada first encountered Lennon’s debut Into the Sun and recognised a kindred sensibility in its adventurous melodic language and experimental pop instincts. “Whenever we work together, I’m always struck by the breadth of his musical talent,” Oyamada says. “Ideas naturally move beyond the boundaries of what either of us initially imagined.” Lennon describes their collaboration simply: “I’m always honoured to work with Keigo, he’s one of my favorite humans on the Earth Planet!”
