Hikaru Utada's "First Love" may have sold more copies, but it's hard to think of a Japanese album from the 1990s that has endured like "Fantasma." Keigo Oyamada was 28 years old when he released his third full-length as Cornelius in 1997: a dense collage of polychromatic meta-pop, full of improbable genre collisions and loving nods to its creator's wide-ranging record collection.
As he prepares to revisit the album during a six-date "Fantasma" tour in the United States, Oyamada says there are things on the record he might have done differently now.
"The songs are 20 years old, so some of them still sound fine to me, but I'll often listen and think, 'Oh, I wish I'd done it more like this,' " he says with a laugh. "I couldn't have made those songs at any other time — because of the era, sure, but also because I was young."
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