You only have to watch a clip from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s 1979 or 1980 world tours to appreciate that Yukihiro Takahashi, who died Jan. 11 at age 70, was a hell of a drummer.

The members of Japan’s pioneering electronic band defined themselves by surrendering their musicianship to machines, crafting a new idiom for pop music through their innovative use of synthesizers, sequencers, samplers and digital recording technology. However, those machines generally weren’t designed for live performance and had a habit of malfunctioning. In concerts, YMO often had to fall back on old-fashioned instrumental technique, which was something that Takahashi and his bandmates had in abundance.

The group’s mastermind, Haruomi Hosono, was a veteran of influential folk-rock band Happy End and an established solo artist, while Ryuichi Sakamoto was a classically educated graduate of the prestigious Tokyo University of the Arts. Meanwhile, Takahashi had already tasted international acclaim with glam rockers Sadistic Mika Band, who toured the U.K. with Roxy Music in 1975, only to split up at the end of that year.

Sadistic Mika Band was the first Japanese rock group to do well overseas, although its label back home failed to capitalize on the success. That wouldn’t be the case when YMO exploded onto the scene a few years later, even if it took the intervention of U.S. record producer and music executive Tommy LiPuma to convince Japanese label, Alfa Records, to sign off on the project.

YMO’s members were all prolific session musicians: They first recorded together on Hosono’s 1978 “Paraiso” album, though they could also be heard on contemporaneous releases by artists such as Taeko Onuki and Rajie. Hosono’s younger collaborators hadn’t been his first choices for the new electronic pop band he was looking to form, but they each brought something vital to the group. Sakamoto was the synthesizer virtuoso and avant-garde theorist, schooled in the work of postwar composers such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis. Takahashi, a sometime fashion designer, took charge of the group’s image while serving as its principal vocalist and rhythmic linchpin.

Long before it became standard practice for drummers to play with a click track, Takahashi willingly subordinated himself to the metronomic beat of a Roland MC-8 sequencer, yet still managed to be infectiously funky. The clip of YMO’s famous appearance on American variety show “Soul Train” in 1980 demonstrates that they could get a crowd moving. (It also showcases their gleeful skewering of Orientalist tropes — which they kept up even when it wasn’t clear that their audience was in on the joke.)

When the show’s host, Don Cornelius, asks Takahashi about YMO’s musical influences, he name-checks their most obvious forebear — Kraftwerk — but the first thing he mentions is, “of course, soul.” He’d discovered the sounds of the Stax and Motown labels as a teenager, tuning in to radio broadcasts by the U.S. Forces’ Far East Network (FEN), which also nurtured his taste for American pop and soft rock, The Beatles and more experimental sounds.

He started playing drums at age 11, later citing Al Jackson Jr. and Bernard Purdie — soul mainstays revered for their precise time-keeping — as key influences, along with The Beatles’ Ringo Starr (who had his moments, too). Takahashi didn’t go in for fancy drum solos, favoring tight grooves accented with crisply executed fills. It allowed him to slip into the music, holding things together without calling attention to himself.

He would often play a similar steadying influence within YMO, as he found himself caught in the middle of personality clashes between Sakamoto and Hosono. The success of their million-selling 1979 sophomore album, “Solid State Survivor,” briefly turned YMO into the biggest pop act in Japan, and the pressure caused tempers to fray. When Sakamoto effectively absented himself from the studio sessions for 1981’s “BGM,” Takahashi began to play a more prominent songwriting role, although by that point he was already establishing himself as a solo artist and producer.

He had released his first album, “Saravah!,” shortly before YMO’s debut in 1978: a Francophile lounge-pop pastiche that was gloriously out of step with the music scene at the time. Subsequent albums such as 1981’s “Neuromantic” served as a more obvious extension of Takahashi’s work with YMO, though they were less arch and more rooted in traditional songcraft. His relaxed vocals, often delivered in English, betrayed the influence of David Bowie and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. (When I interviewed him in 2018, Takahashi recalled that Ferry had blanked him throughout Sadistic Mika Band’s 1975 U.K. tour, then greeted him like an old friend when they met in Japan again after YMO’s breakout success.)

Takahashi’s run of solo albums between 1980’s “Murdered by the Music” and 1984’s “Wild & Moody” is particularly strong, and probably the best place for new initiates to start. However, he did much of his strongest work with others. At the peak of YMO’s fame in the early 1980s, he started a duo, The Beatniks, with songwriter Keiichi Suzuki, to which he would return at various points over the coming decades. He also struck up a long-running creative partnership with Steve Jansen, formerly of synthpop group Japan, as well as producing albums for a range of artists, some of whom — fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, comedian Naoto Takenaka — weren’t exactly known for their music.

In the early 2000s, Takahashi reconvened with Hosono to release two albums of playful electronica under the name Sketch Show, paving the way for a full-fledged YMO reunion later in the decade. Meanwhile, the seeds planted by the group during their original heyday continued to bear fruit. Their use of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, in particular, galvanized the emerging hip-hop scene in the U.S. and provided key inspiration for the birth of techno in Detroit later in the decade. In 1993, YMO’s members showed that they had been paying attention when they reunited briefly and made a straight-up dance record, “Technodon.”

They no longer sounded like innovators by that point, but they had already inspired a generation of Japanese electronic musicians, who would come to be dubbed “YMO Children.” The group’s sounds — and irreverent humor — informed the work of 1990s dance music luminaries such as Denki Groove and Towa Tei. YMO also spawned a legion of synthesizer-wielding imitators, including TM Network, whose Tetsuya Komuro would go on to become the defining J-pop producer of the ’90s.

Things came full circle in 2014 when Takahashi formed the supergroup Metafive with some of the artists he’d influenced, including Tei, former Denki Groove member Yoshinori Sunahara, and Keigo Oyamada, better known as Cornelius. Although they would go on to record two albums of original material, they started off playing faithful re-creations of the music Takahashi had made during his YMO years — which he discovered his collaborators knew even better than he did.

“Whenever I wondered who had done what on a particular track, they’d be pulling out bootleg recordings and filling me in on all the details,” he told me in a 2014 interview. The band was initially billed, with tongue firmly in cheek, as Yukihiro Takahashi & Metafive, though they soon dropped the first part. As was often the case during Takahashi’s career, he wasn’t inclined to hog the spotlight, even if he was unfailingly the best-dressed person on stage.

When a notable artist dies, it’s common to emphasize their individual achievements. Yet Takahashi’s career was a testament to something just as inspiring: how the greatest art is often created through collaboration.