Interview with Keigo Oyamada and Yuri Suzuki

To mark the launch of "THE AMBIENT MACHINE - Point by Cornelius edition", designer Yuri Suzuki sat down with Keigo Oyamada.

Starting from "THE AMBIENT MACHINE - Point by Cornelius edition", the conversation covers the background to making Point 25 years ago and how Oyamada approached sound at the time, his sense of sound in everyday life, the collaborations on Refractions, the album released this month, and where Cornelius goes from here.

Yuri Suzuki: Thank you for agreeing to collaborate again.

One of the starting points for "THE AMBIENT MACHINE - Point by Cornelius edition" was hearing from Akimoto at E&Y that you'd mentioned wanting to do something with the sound of water.

As it happens, this year is also the 25th anniversary of Point, so that felt like the right theme to propose.

Q1: On Point

Yuri Suzuki: For me, Point feels like a major turning point, the album that set the direction for the Cornelius sound that followed, right through to Dream In Dream and now Refractions.

Coming out of the dizzying, collage-like world of Fantasma, Point seems to move towards something where each individual sound is more finely honed, and where the placement of sounds and the space itself become the focus.

What was changing for you in the roughly four years between Fantasma and Point?

Keigo Oyamada: Those four years were a period when a lot changed at once: my working environment, my private life and the way I made music.

Fantasma was what really got things going overseas. I started getting remix requests from artists I'd been influenced by, like Beck, Blur and Sting. Through those experiences, the international music scene I'd only ever looked at from the outside began to feel much closer, and I think that mattered a great deal.

At the same time, getting married and having a child changed my life completely. Around then I also cleared out a lot of my belongings, and both physically and mentally my attention shifted from adding things to taking things away.

On the production side, the situation around sampling was changing too. Copyright and clearance had become far more complicated, and it was getting hard to keep working the way I had, quoting large amounts of existing recordings and collaging them together. The whole industry was shifting as well. With the millennium approaching, it felt as if the old values and methods were gradually being swapped out for something else.

In the middle of all that, I found myself drawn to more minimal music. Instead of sampling existing records, I started recording natural and environmental sounds myself and using those as raw material.

The evolution of DAWs was another big factor. It wasn't just that you could place sounds with great precision; you could also deliberately create complete silence, total blank space. So I began thinking not only about what to play, but about where not to play, and how to structure the gaps between sounds.

With Point, I became conscious of silence and ma, the interval itself, as elements of the music. If Fantasma built its world by piling up information and quotation, Point kept only what was necessary and paid much closer attention to the outline of each sound, its position and the space around it.

That sensibility of placing sounds within a space, and treating the silence between them as part of the composition, carried on into the Cornelius sound from then on.

Yuri Suzuki: The title, the artwork and the sounds on the album all seem to carry themes of "water" and "point of view". Where did those materials and ideas come from?

Keigo Oyamada: The title Point carried two meanings for me: "viewpoint", and the image of treating a sound as a single point.

On Fantasma I'd layered all sorts of sounds and information to build up a whole. On Point I tried to set each sound down as an independent dot, and to compose with its position, the distance between sounds and the space around them. It was something like pointillism: each dot is tiny, but the way they're arranged lets an overall image emerge.

The blue dot on the sleeve also carried the image of water. A small point, like a single droplet, with a large space spreading out around it. That visual image overlapped with how I was thinking about sound at the time: treating not just the sound itself but the emptiness and stillness around it as one world.

Water has no fixed form either. It changes shape according to its surroundings and spreads out in ripples, so it connected naturally with what interested me then.

These images and sounds didn't really come from one clear concept. They were the result of everything I've mentioned coming together: the changes in my life, in the world around music, in technology and in the times. My own viewpoint had shifted, and with it the way I heard sounds and the things I paid attention to in music. That found its way naturally into the title, the artwork and the whole sound of Point.

Q2: Sound in everyday life

Yuri Suzuki: I'd like to step away from music itself for a moment.

You make music for a living, but I also sense that you're simply someone who loves sound.

When it comes to the sounds you hear in daily life and around the city, or the sounds used in products and public spaces, are there things that bother you, or that you think could be done better?

And on the flip side, are there sounds in everyday life that strike you as good?

Keigo Oyamada: Living in a city, there's a lot of sound that I find unpleasant. It may be an occupational hazard, but the thing that bothers me most is background music in restaurants. However good the food is, if loud J-pop is playing, I find I can't settle. It's not that the music is bad in itself. Whether it suits the place and the situation makes an enormous difference.

Conversely, when I go to the countryside or somewhere with a lot of nature, I'm reminded of how beautiful environmental sound is. Insects and birds, the wind, the waves, trees moving. Natural sounds have a complexity and fluctuation that deliberately made sounds don't, and just listening to them seems to ease stress. When I travel abroad, I sometimes record environmental sounds that you can only hear in that particular place.

That said, there are plenty of interesting artificial sounds too. The sounds machines make when they're running, an MRI scanner in a hospital, say, or a printer, contain incredibly complex rhythms and overtones that no one intended, and sometimes it feels like listening to techno or experimental music. I can't help tuning in to sounds like that.

Everyday life is full of things that weren't made as music but can feel like music if you shift the way you listen slightly. I still respond to those sounds instinctively.

Q3: Composition and sound design

Yuri Suzuki: I work with sound design myself, so this is something I've wanted to ask you for a long time.

Listening to Cornelius, it feels as though the "composition" of melody and harmony happens alongside a very deliberate attention to the texture of each sound, how it resonates and the distance between sounds.

For you, are composing and designing sound separate activities? Or have you always thought of them as one thing?

Keigo Oyamada: Particularly when it comes to recordings, I don't really think of composing and designing sound as separate. For me, composition isn't only about writing melodies and harmonies. It's the whole of what you hear as music.

In copyright terms, it's essentially the main melody and the lyrics that count as "the work", but from where music is today that seems a rather old way of thinking.

When I actually make music, I'm considering not just melody and chords but words, timbre, texture, rhythm, where a sound is placed, the distance between sounds and how all of that fits together, and I give them all equal weight. The same melody played with a different timbre, from a different position, at a different volume, becomes completely different music.

With an album, it goes further still. The track order, the sleeve, the visuals, the titles: together they form one image, one world.

So for me, "composing" doesn't mean writing notes. It means assembling the relationships between all of it: the character and placement of the sounds, the space, the words and the visual imagery.

Q4: Refractions and collaboration

Yuri Suzuki: I'd like to ask about your recent work as well.

On the new album Refractions, collaboration with other artists seems to play a far bigger role than on any previous Cornelius record.

In recent interviews you've talked about bringing in other artists and AI so that the work wouldn't be completed entirely within yourself, which struck me.

You've always collaborated widely on video, graphics and live shows, but this time the emphasis on working with others extends into the music itself, into the composition and performance.

Was there a particular trigger or reason for that shift? And were there moments when a collaboration produced something you'd never have arrived at on your own?

Keigo Oyamada: My recent records had been heading in the direction of drilling down into what was inside me and sharpening a more personal sensibility. In a sense, I'd been getting closer to a singer-songwriter way of working.

But if you keep doing that, the work inevitably ends up being completed within your own senses and judgement alone. I started wanting to bring chance back in, and other people's perspectives, things I wouldn't think of myself.

On Refractions, I made a point of throwing ideas and material at musicians and collaborators I trust, or at AI, and seeing what came back. Something that starts with me passes through someone else and gets bent in a direction I hadn't expected, or splits into several possibilities. Rather than accepting the result as it was, I'd make my own selection from it and fold it back into the work.

In other words, instead of heading straight for a finished form on my own, I deliberately put something external in the middle of the process, in order to shift my own ideas and judgement.

As the title suggests, something passes through the outside and comes back at a slightly different angle, in a slightly different shape. That "refraction" itself was something I adopted as a method this time.

Q5: Finally

Yuri Suzuki: To finish, a very simple question.

What are you most interested in right now? It can be music or anything else.

And if you have any thoughts on how that might feed into future Cornelius work, I'd love to hear them.

Keigo Oyamada: What I've always been interested in are the fundamental questions: human consciousness and perception, what happens after death, how this world is put together.

Lately I've been watching a lot of YouTube on quantum mechanics, physics and consciousness. It's not serious research, more a matter of finding things that look interesting and watching them. But what draws me in is that as science and physics advance, they seem to be edging closer to questions and answers from the spiritual world that were once treated as something entirely separate.

Of course, I don't think they're the same thing, and I don't have the answers myself. But I've always enjoyed thinking about where consciousness comes from, whether the reality we see is really the outside world itself, and why the world exists at all.

And at the same time, I watch just as much really stupid comedy on YouTube (laughs). In my head the two coexist without any contradiction.

That interest in fundamental questions is reflected to some extent in Refractions, and I imagine it will keep influencing future work too, not as a direct theme so much as in the way I see things and the ideas that come out of that.