Jelly Tones

Jelly Tones is the record whose video won awards, but Ken Ishii deserved the attention more for the music than the visuals. 'Extra' and the rest is inventive, melodic, forward-looking techno from one of Japan's finest, and the album holds up better than its famous video might suggest. It ranks at a hundred and seventy-nine because it's slightly overshadowed by its own visual moment, but the tracks are strong, and it's one of the better Japanese techno statements of the era.