Near the end of his Tuesday night Tramp's set, Keigo Oyamada made his move. As his band slammed away at a metal riff, the man known as Cornelius hoisted a tape machine into the air and began jamming on a button. A sampled voice rang out, "C-C-Cornelius! Co-Co-Corn-Cornelius!"| Having demonstrated how to play the sample, Oyamada dropped the tape player into the crowd, strapped on his guitar and lit back into the riff. Soon the music dissolved into chaos, the band pummelling their instruments and the sampled voice's "CorneliusCorneliusCorneliusCornelius" being controlled by the audience.

Such audience participation gimmicks are standard fare for Tokyo's Cornelius, who has pioneered using radio simulcasts, 3-D glasses and elaborate films to re-energize the rock show as an art form. As part of the First International Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue, headlined and organized by the Flaming Lips, Oyamada has shared his wares. The first 500 audience members who showed up at Tramp's were given Walkmans tuned to a simulcast of percussion tracks and sound effects for "superior stereo separation, clarity and depth of sound" (according to tour literature). A tiny camera mounted next to an onstage microphone captured performers on a big screen behind the stage. The multi-media approach doesn't come close to revolutionizing rock & roll, but it sure does inject new energy into the proceedings. Call it innovation, call it gimmickry, call it saving guitar rock for a new millennium.

Cornelius played a short set that was even shorter on songs (more riffing than singing went down), but long on energy. Drummer Yuko Araki pounded out jungle-ish rhythms alongside the band's sweaty guitar stomps, and the audience cheered enthusiastically. The movie screen displayed boxing knock-outs and soccer kick-offs, but the biggest response came when footage of Elvis flickered onscreen in perfect synchonicity to Cornelius' rendition of "Love Me Tender" on the theremin. That he can make such a moment come alive in the middle of a dreamy song like "Brand New Season" proves that Cornelius' innovation is rooted in his love of pop's past.

After Cornelius, the eccentric Englishman Robyn Hitchcock took the stage for a (mostly) acoustic set. At first it seemed that the headphones would be useless in this setting, but soon they filled with left-to-right reverberations of Hitchcock's vocals, and ghostly echoes of perfectly-picked guitar twangs. Hitchcock got some laughs with a song called, "Don't Talk to Me About Gene Hackman," but his more plaintive songs from Jewels for Sophia and Perspex Island were riveting.

Hitchcock has cultivated a unique little patch of songcraft, like a wild English garden somewhere down the hedgerow from Syd Barrett's and underneath the shadow cast by John Lennon's. During "I Feel Beautiful," he sang against the grain of his rhythm guitar, the melody slowly spinning around the beat. When he was joined onstage for his last two songs by his "good friends, the Sebadoh," the temperature rose. Twining their way through the ballad "She Doesn't Exist," Hitchcock and Sebadoh achieved a state of grace.

RODD McLEOD
(August 19, 1999)