Cornelius reinvents pop music by holding a mirror up to its own history. Its distorted image is reflected back as something distinctly magical and new.

Defining Cornelius is difficult, even for its creator, Japanese pop star Keigo Oyamada. "Pock," he says, hopefully. "Maybe pungle?" Only a newly invented word would do justice to his genre-bending musical exploits.

Oyamada has explained Fantasma, his first US. release, as the musical equivalent of "It's a Small World." Just as the Disney ride subverts geography, mysteriously placing India next to France or Brazil, Oyamada creates radical, unexpected juxtapositions of musical styles. Thick guitars crash into drum n' bass pop, distinctions between high and low culture are gently transgressed, as Bach is mutated into a cartoon theme song. Listening to Cornelius is less a trip to Japan than a whirlwind tour through the Western pop idiom.

"With me, it's just a total misinterpretation of things," he says. "I listen to so many different kinds of music, from rock, pop, almost anything. But I don't actually think so much about it, or pay attention to where it came from. This means I am not afraid of mixing different styles and eras of music."

Oyamada has been quietly subverting the boundaries of music making since his days with Flipper's Guitar in the late 80's. With partner Kenji Ozawa (nephew of conductor Seini Ozawa), Flipper's Guitar mixed up samples and styles long before Beck made it trendy.

Pouty, pretty-boy good looks and fashionable posing captured the attention of Japan's screaming girly hordes while their collaboration with Mitsuo Shindo's Contemporary Production design group, also responsible for much of Pizzicato Five's visual identity, resulted in packaging that equaled the musical productions inside. Flipper's Guitar wasn't just pop music, but pop as art.

Oyamada is slightly uncomfortable talking about Flipper's place in the Japanese pop pantheon, but their knack for making music that was both commercially viable as well as artistically significant paved the way for more adventurous Japanese groups to be appreciated at home.

Prior to Flipper's, the Japanese music scene, with a few exceptions, was either insular or imitative. Though an experimental underground existed, it had little chance of reaching beyond a small circuit of clubs and record stores. Flipper's Guitar's cosmopolitan take on pop, interacting with, rather than imitating, the music beyond Japan, found an appreciative audience among the arty denizens who were busily transforming Shibuya, once just another shopping district on Tokyo's westside, into one of the coolest spots on the planet.

When Shibuya-kei (style), as the foreign record stores in the area called it, hit the charts in the early '90s, Japanese kids, long besotted by whatever was trendy in Manchester, Seattle, or New York, suddenly had a music to call their own. As a member of Flipper's svengali to Shibuya-kei chanteuse Kahimi Karie, and producer of bands from Bridge to Pizzicato Five, Oyamada was one of the key personalities that tied this disparate scene together.

Hard rock, coy pop, and a fetish for soccer anthems; an eclectic mix is also the defining quality of Trattoria Records. Founded by Oyamada after the demise of Flipper's, Trattoria has done to the Japanese music scene what Oyamada did to Japanese music.

Five years ago it would have been difficult to imagine a soft rock idol like kaji coexisting in the same musical domain as the Boredom's Eye Yamataka. Oyamada explains it as it being the natural result of "having made a new bunch of friends." His unerring sense of style and taste gives shape and connection to the label's diverse roster, much like his deft manipulation of the musical genres that ping pong through Fantasma.

Shockcity Shockers, a compilation from Trattoria's newest project, Eye's Shockcity label, pushes the boundaries even further. Featuring an array of Eye projects, collaborations between Oyamada and Boredoms drummer Yoshimi, plus the first release of Sound Hero, Eye's project with Japanese hip-hop legend Takagi Kan, Shockcity Shockers may be the most important record to come out of Japan this year.

Oyamada admits that "in the last two or three years there are a lot more Japanese bands that I can seriously listen to," but the current interest in Japanese music overseas has taken him by surprise, too.

"We're just doing our thing here, and suddenly it becomes hip!," he says.

He looks baffled when asked to (comment) about the common points among artists as diverse as Guitarwolf, DJ Krush, or Buffalo Daughter. "Wolves, buffalo, seagulls, and monkeys," he jokes, referring to Cornelius' origins as a character on Planet of the Apes. "We are the Japanese zoo team."

Nevertheless, as Oyamada has learned, people continue to try to define Japanese artists in relation to one another.

"When I was in the US., the press seemed really keen on fitting me into the Japanese stereotype, like the high-tech image of Bladerunner. They'd want to talk about anime (animated movies) and other stuff that are distinctly Japanese and graft that image onto my work."

The urge to categorize artists based on their nationality has dogged Japanese bands working overseas and made it relatively easy to relegate them to the footnotes of rock history. Although the Boredoms and Shonen Knife have had some foreign success, their respective musical attributes are often overlooked in favor of easy stereotypes. The Boredoms validated images of Japan as the dystopian Other; Shonen Knife's inane girlish cuteness was a reassuring reminder that this alien culture posed no threat.

By creating a work as unclassifiable as Fantasma, Oyamada makes such stereotyping untenable. Though he admits he is a Japanese artist by virtue of being from Japan, he is first and foremost an artist.

And, like the most important artists in any medium, Oyamada forces the rediscovery of the familiar. A visitor to Japan often experiences a certain vertigo from the foreign and the familiar threaded through the sieve of Japanese culture. It is an experience quite like listening to Fantasma for the first time.