New Music: Cornelius, Silmaril

Cornelius - Music (Everloving 2007)

Cornelius – Sensuous / Everloving

Oh the cut-and-paste pop song; it very well may be the most pleasant product of the last twenty years of music making. As technology advanced, artists were not only able to refine their compositions after converting it to 0s and 1s, they were able to completely deconstruct every element of the song. Today's musician is far from finished after recording; days, weeks, months and sometimes years are spent rearranging, reimagining, restructuring and recontextualizing those snippets of wavelengths, and very often the final product is a far cry from the initial idea. And with any new approach to recording music, new schools of post-production techniques have surfaced, from the minute, magnifying glass editing of your Matmoses to the heavily layered abrasions of your Kid606es and everywhere in between. Post-pop is a force to be reckoned with and it opens entire new worlds of architectural possibilities for the technological savvy musician. Japanese cut-and-paste pop aficionado Cornelius has been purveying such aural possibilities since 1993 and his kaleidoscoping compositions have been schooling fans and aspiring producers ever since.

Raised just outside of Tokyo, Keigo Oyamada is very much a product of the Shibuya-Kei Japanese pop phenomenon. Like his contemporaries the Pizzicato Five and Cibo Matto, Oyamada was heavily influenced by the colorful, collaging influences of lounge-pop and urban electronica, mashing together the sweet melodies into refracting, complex arrangements that could only be drawn back to the Japanese imagination. He broke stateside with 1997's Beck-ish Fantasma via Matador and solidified his place among pops most impressive post-producers with 2002's excellent Point, which found the quirky musician significantly mellowing out and exploring especially Brazilian melodies and ambient noise. Sensuous continues down this trail, finding Cornelius's arrangements as pristine as ever and proceeding down the path of patience only accessible with age and experience. I don't want to say he's reached the peak of his potential, but this is the twiddling, exotic, playful and organic album we've been patiently waiting from Oyamada all these years.

The CD comes embedded with a music video of the first single, "Fit Song," a skeletal funk-pop piece with swashes of 80s synthesizer. The visual interpretation consists mostly of stop animation using household items ranging from sugar cubes to toothbrushes to reanimated rhino beetles that had no doubt already succumbed to the insect collectors' killing jar. But the sheer fluidity of the video is unbelievable; if it was actually made using the stop animation technique and not a digital editor (though I seriously doubt it), someone spent many an hour agonizing over each frame, which conveniently makes a good parallel to Cornelius's use of samples. When sampling his own instrumental prowess, Oyamada appears to clip every loop just short of its natural decay. The phrase is pristinely rounded off and the originating source is easily decipherable, but his partial selection technique keeps the music innately obtuse and unconventional. So when he approaches a song like "Music," which is a pretty straight-forward tune of mellow Brazilian pop strung through Japanese ideals, all of the lush acoustic guitar strums, synthetic pads and vocal harmonies are clipped strategically and pieced backed together in a collage-like manner to create a delicately jerking pop song. He frequents the laid-back pop-funk apparent in "Fit Song" on a number of occasions, especially effective on onomatopoeic "Beep It." The aptly titled "Breezin'" drifts along with choicely manipulated cheesy-80s-synth-pop source material while Oyamada coos along sounding mostly like Caetano Veloso singing in Japanese, and "Wataridori" could double as animatronic porn music. Album capper "Sleep Warm" is also noteworthy as Oyamada reimagines the 1958 Rat Pack classic of the same name. Utilizing a faux-orchestral arrangement and a healthy amount of Vocoder, Oyamada creates a lullaby for robotic Japanese toys everywhere.

Cornelius cleverly toes the line of cheesy synth-pop and intriguing post-pop with Senuous, and I'd venture to say it's his most realized production to date. He very much taps the curiously engaging synthetic bossa nova coming out of Brazil in the late 80s, but updates it for the new millennium and douses it with a paint bucket full of Shibuya-Kei. It's both organic and electronic, jerky and buoyant, and million other seemingly opposite characteristic pairs made possible through modern recording techniques. It is whole-heartily the work of a sound designer rather than just a musician.






Silmaril - Plymouth Bay (Locust 2007, originally 1973)

Silmaril – The Voyage of Icarus / Locust

So while I'm a pretty big geek about a lot of things, my level of Tolkien geekery is not nearly high enough to give you a proper summation of the exact story of the Silmarils and their relationship to the ridiculously popular Lord of the Rings series. I read The Hobbit years ago and I've seen all three of the movie renditions of the lengthy sequel, but a comfortable understanding of Tolkien's epic legendarium is still a very far cry from my knowledge. But thanks to my mad Wikipedia skills, I have been able to dig up at least a vague description of where we are coming from with an obscure Milwaukee psychedelic folk band and the relationship to their chosen band name.

According to the Wikipedia skills for Silmaril, "[they] are three fictional sacred objects in the form of brilliant star-like jewels which contained the unmarred light of the Two Trees." Two Trees? Yeah, I have no idea either, but continued research reveals they reside in a common mythological element signifying a connection between heaven and earth, bringing order and the divine to terrestrial earth and must be protected at all cost. Okay, so that makes these Silmarils pretty important, but wait! Two of the three were destroyed, so now we are in a bit of a potential apocalyptic pickle. And if I understand this correctly, which I must admit I'm not too confident about, the third and now very important Silmaril was forged into a certain ring you may be familiar with if you've seen the movies/read the books.

Alright, so this collective of musically inclined Milwaukeeans are some serious fantasy geeks, that's not that exciting since Tolkien geekery may be at an all time high these days. Yes, but this Midwest band is also made up of devout Catholics and a lead singer who is torn between his innate homosexuality and his overtly conservative ideas. So now the plot thickens, this legend becomes significantly more interesting and the music that strings it all together begins to come into play. Inspired by the Incredible String Band and the Grateful Dead, Silmaril crafts coffeehouse psychedelic folk with Christian, medieval and operatic influences, not to mention a love for exotic instrumentation and a desire to experiment with musical elements and themes. Culled from the band's sole self-released album, Given Time or the Several Roads in 1973, and the unreleased follow-up No Mirrored Temple, Locust's The Voyage of Icarus will be the first real exposure for the short-lived spiritually confused band, but as they say, better late than never.

Far from the epicenter of acoustic-tinged psychedelic rock in the early 70s, NYC's Lower East Side and San Francisco's Haight Street, frontman Matthew Peregrine (born Jim Boulet), Tom Tews and Michael SanFilippo met in their youthful days spent at Catholic youth retreats. While honing their skills by aping Incredibly String Band songs, multi-instrumentalist William Pint and Mary Ann Filo joined the group under the moniker, Dark Star (yes, after the Grateful Dead song). Filo was quickly ousted by Tews’ girlfriend Sharon Larke (this is shaping up to be some serious Behind the Music drama), the classically trained Mike Krukowski also jumped on board and they thankfully adopted the Silmaril alias. Jamming together with such varying degrees of musicianship and instrumentation, which included a myriad of strings like moon guitars, banjos, fiddles and sitars along with light wind instruments like recorders and kazoos and even on occasions a light-flashing synthesizer or a pump organ, their haunting, trickling, spiritual psychedelic folk came to be.

Bitten by the fantasy bug, the band mixed mystical fairy tales with Christian undertones creating an odd, deeply religious but thoroughly confused ideal within their music. As they began to record Given Time or the Several Roads, frontman Peregrine became involved with Catholic Pentecostalism, a growing charismatic and outlandish branch of Christianity whose stage show heavily influenced Peregrine’s thinking. He also married a close friend because “God instructed him to” further suppressing his homosexuality. Inward tension within the group and the confused inner demons of each of its individual members made for strikingly emotional recordings, and further emphasized by using hauntingly sparse instrumentation. Tracks like “Living Stone,” no doubt referencing both their namesake and Jesus, consisting of no more than delicately plucked acoustic guitar, renaissance-y organ and a vocal duet between Peregrine’s low-key tenor and Larke’s operatic voice. The concentrated banjo twang of “Harrow Hill” is almost Fahey-like before a recorder comes swooping in transforming the tune into some late-night Shire music. Then there are the more exotic songs, like the title track’s mix of droning sitar and Peter, Paul and Mary folk or “Plymouth Bay,” which mixes European string influences with psychedelia.

The latter half of the album features an increasingly growing Christian rock and medieval influence usurping the fantasy stronghold. After recording their unreleased sophomore effort, Peregrine’s marriage broke up, and the group appropriately joined a traveling Renaissance Faire. By the end of the 70s, Silmaril disbanded and Peregrine ended up in Houston finally fully embracing his homosexuality and joining the leather community of the city. He continued his artistic endeavors and eventually ended up in DC where he succumbed to an AIDS-related illness in the mid-90s. The rest of the group continues to make music in varying genres and situations.

With the current climate of New Weird America who share similarly mix thematic influences like Christianity, the Renaissance and fantasy worlds of all kinds, I can easily see the warrant in a re-release like this. Silmaril also share musical elements with this recent movement: psychedelic folk, hymnal emotion, and exotic ventures into European and Indian styles. If you are a fan of acts like Joanna Newsom, Fursaxa, Devendra Banhart and the long list of other freak folkers who I am not familiar with, this is definitely worth your time as a starting point for the genre they’ve since swirled into something truly epic. Silmaril’s back story is as enticing and hypnotic as their dark, delicate music and unless you are up for some serious digging to try and surface an original wax copy of their sole self-released LP, I’d pick up this disc.