Japanese producer and artist Cornelius has shared an extended digital version of last year’s Record Store Day Black Friday release ‘Ripple Waves’ featuring b-sides, live versions, and reworks from internationally esteemed artists including Beach Fossils, Hiatus Kaiyote, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto of tracks from his latest studio album, ‘Mellow Waves’. Also included is a live version of If You’re Here along with a cover of Drake’s Passionfruit that were recorded in conjunction with Spotify during Cornelius’s 2018 US tour and original music composed for the ‘Audio Architecture’ exhibit at Tokyo’s renowned 21_21 Design Sight museum. The installation saw nine different directors create unique videos for the track, and you can watch the Cornelius variation via YouTube below.
The innovative musician has spent the past year touring in support of his most recent release ‘Mellow Waves,’ including a North American tour that began at NRMAL Festival in Mexico City, stopping in New York, Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, and down the west coast. On the tour, Cornelius also stopped into NPR’s offices for a Tiny Desk Concert (link). The ‘Mellow Waves’ tour took Cornelius to Europe last summer, with sets at London’s Field Day Festival and Barcelona’s Sónar Festival.
‘Mellow Waves,’ Cornelius’s first album in over 11 years, mixes eastern
Cornelius made his name in the 90s as “the Japanese Beck” with cult albums such as the genre-defying ‘Fantasma‘ (1997), which mixed the 60s harmonies of The Beach Boys with krautrock and French pop, and the precise found-sounds glitch electronica of ‘Point’ (2002) and ‘Sensuous’ (2006), as well as remixes of Blur, MGMT, Bloc Party, The Beastie Boys and more. As Patrick St. Michael from Stereogum explains, he created; “a genre-skipping and time-traveling take on pop that defined ‘cool’ to many in Japan over the decade (not to mention get him critical love and a label deal abroad [with Matador Records]).”
