It’s simple to be swept up by the chic great thing about an Ichiko Aoba music: Her crystalline voice and classical guitar are arresting, exuding a quiet persistence that appears to decrease the amount of every part round it. She’s ostensibly a folks artist, however the transfixing nature of her work feels extra like sorcery, as if she had been weaving spells from every filigreed guitar determine and porcelain syllable. You don’t must know Japanese to know her singing; her music conveys an emotional resonance that eludes description however is as acquainted as muscle reminiscence.
In 2020, after six putting albums of minimalist, calmly jazz-influenced folks, Aoba’s imaginative and prescient and instrumental palette expanded dramatically. On that yr’s Windswept Adan, an idea album set on the fictional island of Adan, Aoba and her foremost collaborator, Taro Umebayashi, added components like sweeping strings, synths, and subject recordings to her delicate sound. The album introduced Aoba, who’d developed an enormous following in Japan, to worldwide acclaim. If earlier songs had been pinhole snapshots, Windswept Adan was stuffed with wall-sized panoramas, zooming out to seize the immensity of existence.
On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s beautiful and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi additional broaden their horizons. It’s a sequel of kinds to Windswept Adan, taking its title from the 2020 album’s closing monitor. However as a substitute of constant that document’s storyline, Aoba examines its themes from extra summary angles, utilizing the interconnectivity of nature to unpack life’s cosmic mysteries. The earlier album’s closing monitor ends with a two-minute recording of waves gently crashing on a shoreline; the brand new document takes us beneath the floor. A lot of Aoba’s inspiration got here from visits to the Ryukyu Archipelago, which lies southwest of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s 4 largest islands. There, she’d dive into the ocean with out scuba gear, going as deep because the breath in her lungs would take her. She sought the colourful array of bioluminescent beings, creatures like jellyfish, algae, and sea stars which have developed to provide their very own mild inside the ocean’s crushing darkness. In press supplies and interviews, she’s described these dives as terrifying however lovely, acts of submission to the surroundings’s boundlessness.
All through Luminescent Creatures, the colourful preparations place Aoba in the course of an enormous panorama. As flute and strings soar overhead like flocks of birds on opener “COLORATURA,” and whereas synthesizers shimmer within the distance on “SONAR,” Aoba sounds alone, her voice calmly bathed in sufficient reverb to attract consideration to the magnitude of every part surrounding her. That solitude reads as extra existential than melancholy, a comforting acknowledgement that she’s merely a blip within the infinite. On Windswept Adan, she typically blended with the instrumentation, sitting barely beneath the fingerpicked nylon guitar of “Sagu Palm’s Music” or overtaken by the twinkling music-box association of “Pilgrimage.” She was the imagineer of that document, weaving herself into the story unspooling from her thoughts. In distinction, Luminescent Creatures is rooted in her experiences of touring to distant islands, swimming within the tide, and finding out how climate and local weather change have an effect on coral reefs. Right here, she’s within the position of observer, documenting actuality fairly than conjuring it from complete material.