It’s easy to be swept up by the sublime beauty of an Ichiko Aoba song: Her crystalline voice and classical guitar are arresting, exuding a quiet patience that seems to lower the volume of everything around it. She’s ostensibly a folk artist, but the transfixing nature of her work feels more like sorcery, as if she were weaving spells from each filigreed guitar figure and porcelain syllable. You don’t need to know Japanese to understand her singing; her music conveys an emotional resonance that eludes description but is as familiar as muscle memory.
In 2020, after six striking albums of minimalist, lightly jazz-influenced folk, Aoba’s vision and instrumental palette expanded dramatically. On that year’s Windswept Adan, a concept album set on the fictional island of Adan, Aoba and her main collaborator, Taro Umebayashi, added elements like sweeping strings, synths, and field recordings to her delicate sound. The album brought Aoba, who’d developed a huge following in Japan, to international acclaim. If earlier songs were pinhole snapshots, Windswept Adan was full of wall-sized panoramas, zooming out to capture the immensity of existence.
On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s exquisite and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi further broaden their horizons. It’s a sequel of sorts to Windswept Adan, taking its name from the 2020 album’s final track. But instead of continuing that record’s storyline, Aoba examines its themes from more abstract angles, using the interconnectivity of nature to unpack life’s cosmic mysteries. The previous album’s closing track ends with a two-minute recording of waves gently crashing on a shoreline; the new record takes us below the surface. Much of Aoba’s inspiration came from visits to the Ryukyu Archipelago, which lies southwest of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four largest islands. There, she’d dive into the sea without scuba gear, going as deep as the breath in her lungs would take her. She sought the colorful array of bioluminescent beings, creatures like jellyfish, algae, and sea stars that have evolved to produce their own light within the ocean’s crushing darkness. In press materials and interviews, she’s described those dives as terrifying but beautiful, acts of submission to the environment’s boundlessness.
Throughout Luminescent Creatures, the vibrant arrangements position Aoba in the middle of a vast landscape. As flute and strings soar overhead like flocks of birds on opener “COLORATURA,” and while synthesizers shimmer in the distance on “SONAR,” Aoba sounds alone, her voice lightly bathed in enough reverb to draw attention to the magnitude of everything surrounding her. That solitude reads as more existential than melancholy, a comforting acknowledgement that she’s merely a blip in the infinite. On Windswept Adan, she often blended with the instrumentation, sitting slightly below the fingerpicked nylon guitar of “Sagu Palm’s Song” or overtaken by the twinkling music-box arrangement of “Pilgrimage.” She was the imagineer of that record, weaving herself into the tale unspooling from her mind. In contrast, Luminescent Creatures is rooted in her experiences of traveling to remote islands, swimming in the tide, and studying how weather and climate change affect coral reefs. Here, she’s in the role of observer, documenting reality rather than conjuring it from whole cloth.
To drive these maritime observations home, Aoba and Umebayashi sprinkle brilliant little details throughout. On “mazamun,” the microphone is so close to Umebayashi’s celesta that you can hear his fingers on the keys and the hammers striking metal bars. The overtones created by the instrument’s resonators form an airy haze around Aoba’s voice, but the fluttering mechanical sounds feel like water lapping against a wooden boat. Later, Aoba floats atop the piano arpeggios and waltzing bass of “Luciférine” like a buoy bobbing on the chop.
The only song on Luminescent Creatures that Aoba and Umebayashi didn’t write is “24° 3′ 27.0″ N, 123° 47′ 7.5″ E.” If you follow the coordinates in the title, you’ll find a lighthouse at the center of Hateruma, the southernmost inhabited island in Japan. A version of a traditional folk song taught only to locals, it wafts like a coastal breeze, a deep drone underpinning occasional piano chords, guitar strums, and violin plucks. It’s a deceptively complex arrangement for a minute-long piece, contemporary but reverent of its origins. Since 2013, Aoba has traveled regularly to Hateruma island and connected with its people, who eventually taught her the ancient tune. It’s a gift, an honor bestowed upon the singer, who came to the island to both observe and immerse herself in its landscape and culture. Luminescent Creatures is her gift to those of us willing to dive with no gear. The universe is enormous, and we are merely specks—but if we look deep enough, we’ll find that we’re part of its fabric.
