In 1998, I'd finally returned to my hometown from years of wandering a grey, concrete town in the midlands (where a good few music introductions listed here took place). At first, it was a massive comedown: I no longer knew anybody, I'd left all my friends behind, and I was back living at home in the interim. Basically, it sucked, but if I could go back in time, I'd tell myself then: "Don't worry, mate. It's going to get better. Much better". And it did. But that in itself is another story.
How this album relates to the above is as follows: back in the aforementioned wandering years, I chanced across Ishii's 'Echo Exit' on MTV. A chilled techno track with slick Anime stylings (I still have the beautifully packaged single somewhere), which was my introduction to an electronic artist I wanted to know better. One day, I was browsing the 'Electronic' section in a record shop, and came across two Ken Ishii albums; this and another called 'Jelly Tones'. I actually bought 'Jelly Tones' first, mostly because the stylish cover art reminded me of the aforementioned 'Echo Exit' single. I played this album a lot and really liked it, but it was ''Innerelements' (which I bought sometime later) that really got my attention.
As it was the 90s, I was already more than familiar with dance-based electronica as it was practically everywhere (though back then you mostly heard the pop or club stuff which didn't appeal to me very much). However, as someone who was, at the time, very much in the alt-rock camp (despite a strong affinity for electronic music), I wanted something a bit different. Something that subverted all that banal, clubby landfill, something with an edge; and I found exactly what I was looking for with Ishii's fresh take on techno.
I credit 'Innerelements' as being another key album in shaping the way I thought about my own music as Ishii turned what I thought I knew about electronic music on its head. 'Innerelements' was as far away from generic dance-pop as you could possibly get: skeletal, syncopated (and at times, tribal) 4/4 rhythms skittered and shuffled playfully as smoothly discordant, yet melodic synths fleshed out the tracks. It was all new, but I loved it. As with 'Jelly Tones' and the 'Echo Exit' single, I often envisioned this music as the soundtrack to some futuristic anime. And so, as with Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works', Spooky's 'Found Sound' and Plaid's 'Not For Threes', a desire to explore the outer limits of the electronic was born in earnest.
As it turns out, 'Innerelements' isn't even an album. It's actually a compilation of Ishii's earlier works, and this is something I only found out recently. Nevertheless, it introduced me to what I consider to be some of his best material and shaped the architectural framework of my own music, earning it a place here amongst other sounds that have made me.
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