something old against something older.

The American debut of Cornelius (a k a Keigo Oyamada) is a case in point. On Fantasma, the twenty-nine-year-old Japanese musician throws everything he can think of against the walls of his studio and makes sure none of it sticks for very long. Hip-hop beats, cartoon music, shoe-gazer guitar theatrics, a reference to a "Farrah Fawcett feel-alike contest" and, again and again, Brian Wilson hommages pop in and out of earshot faster than you can say "channel-surfin' USA." Somehow, this qualifies as chart-topping material in Japan, where the album went multiplatinum.

Unlike Beck, who gets away with making Top Forty cut-and-paste music because the paste in question is his distinct Beck-ishness, Cornelius prefers to hide behind wraparound shades and let his musical jokes stand as musical jokes. With its distorted-guitar breakdowns, sugary harmonies and revving automotor climax, "New Music Machine" could have been called "My Bloody Deuce Coupe." "Star Fruits Surf Rider," with its Van Dyke Parks-style orchestration disrupted by insane jungle beats, sounds like an unintentional parody of Goldie's gaseous techno symphony "Mother." This is every bit as funny and fun as you'd guess. But until the day that Nike uses "Revolution 9" rather than "Revolution" as a commercial soundtrack, Cornelius is likely to stay filed under "big in Japan." (RS 784)

JEFF SALAMON