I was, at best, a casual Bape-head. As a tragically underemployed teen-ager in the mid-aughts, I was rarely brave enough to ask my parents to shell out hundreds on the coveted sneakers, hoodies, and T-shirts imported from Japan to select New York retailers (and eventually only available at the clothing brand’s flagship store, in SoHo). But that didn’t ever stop me from looking. Bape, a.k.a. A Bathing Ape, stood out as an original, distinctly anti-industry idea: the product of a singular vision by a Japanese designer named Nigo, who funnelled his obsession with American pop culture and hip-hop into all of his work. His mesmerizing camouflage patterns and playful flips of ubiquitous products like the Nike Air Force One were meant to jerk the heads of those who understood his references. Even as I saved, traded, and bartered my way into owning a few cherished pieces, I mostly got my kicks scouring Web sites and catalogues that listed Bape wares: even just looking at the shooting-star and ape-head logos felt deeply satisfying, as if something out there had finally lived up to the term “eye candy.” Design has a profound effect on how we process the world; seeing something pleasing and familiar, I found, could cause the same sensation as a sweet smell, or a moving sound.

In 2000, Nigo quietly produced and released an album, called “Ape Sounds.” This was well before he was a cult figure in the United States: Nigo was still establishing himself in the D.I.Y. fashion scene in Harajuku, and was around half a decade away from earning loyal A-list fans, including Pharrell and Robin Williams. Free from the pressures of soon-to-pry eyes, he made a fascinating, experimental record for the boutique label Mo Wax, attempting his own versions of the genres he liked: the knotty, layered rap of midcareer Beastie Boys, the frantic breakbeat trip-hop of DJ Shadow and UNKLE, and the woozy psych-rock of bands like the Verve. Overseeing the song concepts, samples, and drum programming, Nigo wrangled a constellation of artists from Japan and the U.S. for a collage of pop choruses and ambling compositions that would play well in one of his meticulously designed stores. I first heard the album this summer. What wowed me wasn’t just the confidence and ambition of the material—the rag-doll punk of “Jet Set” or the Beatles-esque wink of “A Simple Song”—but how prescient Nigo’s music seemed. His songs “Monster” and “Freediving” nearly preëmpt N.E.R.D.’s coy pop-rock style, which would début two years later, and the solar fuzz of “Too Much” heralds the bright tones of Kid Cudi, a rapper who, years later, would get his start working at Bape’s New York shop. Still, most of the material, full of inelegant twists and innovations, escapes easy categorization—Nigo isn’t a musician, which makes his début album that much more boundless, and impressive. In a review for Entertainment Weekly, among the scarce press that “Ape Sounds” received at the time of its release, the critic Will Hermes suggests that “this moonlighter should quit his day job.”

As the human record of music is digitized and catalogued onto streaming services, we’ll never know just how many oddities like these are left on the analog floor. “Ape Sounds” is available on Apple Music and Spotify, but, in the collector’s tradition, I recently purchased a physical copy of the CD. The artwork and packaging were designed by Nigo, in collaboration with the graffiti artist Futura 2000, and they show early strands of Bape’s visual motifs. Clothes are among the last products young fans collect with fervor, because of their tactile physical value—you can’t stream a T-shirt, but “Ape Sounds” is probably as close as you can get.