CORNELIUS shares new single "Twisting & Glistening". Album 'REFRACTIONS' out Aug 19 on EYOE. Barbican show.

CORNELIUS - Shares new single "Twisting & Glistening" - From forthcoming album ‘REFRACTIONS' - Out August 19th on Eat Your Own Ears Recordings - Barbican show & Japanese tour dates confirmed

Photo credit: Hideaki Hamada. Today, Cornelius shares a third track from his forthcoming new album ‘REFRACTIONS’, due for release on August 19th on Eat Your Own Ears Recordings, with a show at London's Barbican on sale for next year. For more than three decades, Japanese musician, producer and composer Keigo Oyamada has occupied a singular space in contemporary music, transforming everyday sound into intricate rhythmic systems and immersive, cinematic soundscapes. ‘REFRACTIONS’ continues this trajectory while marking a subtle but important shift outward. Where previous Cornelius records often leaned toward introspection, this new work is shaped more explicitly through collaboration and exchange. Following previous singles "Yumenemi" and “Aeons”, which features vocals from Sean Ono Lennon, today we see another facet to Cornelius’ ever-shifting sonic world as he picks up the pace for a bright, danceable funk track, entitled "Twisting & Glistening". "Using electronic dance music from around 1985 as a starting point, I layered in jazz-influenced tension chords, carefully placing each sound with a sense of space and frequency range" Cornelius explains. "It’s a track where I revisited sounds I loved as a teenager, but from where I am now. I hadn’t really tried this kind of approach before, and once I started working with it, it felt unexpectedly fresh. The unresolved chords also came about quite naturally. That suspended feeling ended up connecting with the lyric’s sense of something that disappears just as you try to grasp it. Mirrors, reflections, sound, waves — they all exist, but they never quite settle into a fixed form. That kind of shifting perception sits at the center of the track." He continues: "A lot of my recent work has been more introspective, but with the sense of stagnation in the world and the intensity of the times we’re living through, I’ve also found myself drawn to music that opens outward a little more. I think that feeling connects to the rhythm of this track, its outward movement, and the sensation of chords that remain unresolved." Listen to “Twisting & Glistening” on YouTube: https://youtu.be/w4c9NdIwz3M Other streaming options: https://cornelius.lnk.to/TwistingGlistening ‘‘Refractions’’ album links: https://linktr.ee/Cornelius_Japan Emerging in the early 1990s after the dissolution of Tokyo pop group Flipper’s Guitar, Keigo Oyamada quickly developed a reputation as a meticulous sonic architect, building dense, playful and highly detailed musical worlds that dissolve genre boundaries entirely. International breakthrough album 'Fantasma' (1997) established Cornelius on a global stage and is widely regarded as a landmark in experimental pop. Its collage-like approach to production drew comparisons to The Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, Beck and The Beastie Boys, while helping define a new international appetite for adventurous Japanese music. Nearly three decades later, the album continues to resonate with new generations of listeners, with b-side “Typewrite Lesson" recently unexpectedly finding renewed life in a viral moment on TikTok and support from artists such as Rosalía. “This time, instead of turning inward, I wanted to open the work through interaction with others,” says Cornelius of his new work. “I’ve come to feel more strongly that reality is not something completed within oneself, but something shaped through relationships and exchanges.” That philosophy runs through the fabric of ‘REFRACTIONS’, which also features contributions from Arto Lindsay, Bid, and longtime collaborator Shintaro Sakamoto. Across ‘REFRACTIONS’, Cornelius continues to explore shifting perception, memory and interconnected consciousness, not through narrative but through sound itself. Tracks behave less like fixed compositions and more like living systems: ideas branch, overlap and mutate, forming an evolving sonic landscape where multiple states coexist at once. Despite its conceptual framework, the record remains deeply human in tone. There is a familiar warmth and playfulness embedded within its intricate construction, a sense of curiosity that has long defined Cornelius’ work. Drawing from psychedelic pop, ambient music, Brazilian tropicália, kosmische experimentation and minimalist composition, ‘Refractions’ ultimately resists categorisation, existing instead within its own internal logic. For new listeners, ‘REFRACTIONS’ offers a gateway into one of contemporary music’s most quietly influential catalogues. For long-time followers, it reveals an artist still expanding and reshaping his language after more than three decades. What emerges is not a fixed statement, but something constantly in motion: music that refracts, reshapes and reorients itself as it unfolds. ‘REFRACTIONS’ marks the beginning of a new chapter for Cornelius, an artist who remains entirely singular in the landscape of modern music. Cornelius live dates: 10 Sep - Yokohama, JP - KT Zepp Yokohama 12 Sep - Tokyo, JP - CLUB QUATTRO 13 Sep - Fukuoka, JP - Zepp Fukuoka 19 Sep - Sapporo, JP - Zepp Sapporo 22 Sep - Nagoya, JP - Zepp Nagoya 23 Sep - Osaka, JP - Zepp Namba 26 Sep - Sendai, JP - Sendai PIT 2 Oct - Tokyo, JP - Zepp Haneda 3 Oct - Tokyo, JP - Zepp Haneda 6 Oct - Tokyo, JP - Zepp Shinjuku (TOKYO) 19 Jun, 2027 - London, UK - Barbican Links: https://www.corneliusjapan.com/ https://www.instagram.com/corneliusofficial/ https://www.facebook.com/corneliusofficial https://x.com/corneliusjapan https://www.eatyourownears.com/releases https://eatyourownearsrecordings.bandcamp.com/