The intervening years have changed Ms. Takada’s fortunes.

“Anything ambient, Japanese, electronic or vaguely related was linking to this video,” said Jacob Gorchov, who runs the Palto Flats label and reissued Ms. Takada’s enigmatic album last year in conjunction with the Swiss label WRWTFWW Records. It became the No. 2-selling album at the online retailer Discogs for 2017, behind only Radiohead’s “OK Computer.” In the wake of the YouTube video’s popularity, Ms. Takada has toured Europe multiple times and her other albums have been reissued in the last year; next month a reissue of her short-lived first band, Mkwaju Ensemble, will be released as well.

Classically trained as a percussionist, Ms. Takada originally performed in the Berlin RIAS Symphonie-Orchester at the start of her career in the mid-1970s, but soon found herself dissatisfied with the Western classical musical tradition. “If I continued to play westernized contemporary music, it needed many more instruments like an orchestra,” Ms. Takada said.

Instead, she gravitated to the Minimalism of composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley. And much like these composers, she was also interested in African drumming and Indonesian gamelan. In these unfussy world music sounds she heard something far more abundant. “People say it’s poor, but from very few materials, they produce rich sounds just using their body and hands,” she said. “How to make a worldly sound by your body and with simple materials was an important thing to me.”

Unable to learn much about African music in Japan, Ms. Takada instead studied African drumming by way of two albums of field recordings, from Tanzania and Zimbabwe. “I copied from the vinyl, writing down the rhythm structures, and tried it by myself,” she said of her rigorous daily practice to learn polyrhythms, likening it to a daily mantra. “It changed my body.”