Ichiko Aoba: “I was diving in the ocean with just the breath in my lungs, swimming with whales, listening to them sing”

Ichiko Aoba’s music is both calming and transportive. Initially played solo with just guitar and voice, and latterly with an orchestral backing, the Japanese singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s recordings offer hushed and magical spaces a world away from the information overload of modern life. Since emerging onto the folk music scene as an 18-year-old with her debut album Kamisori Otome (Razorblade Maiden) in 2010, she has amassed a dedicated following, first in her native country and then further afield with the international success of 2020’s Windswept Adan. Her growing renown has seen her collaborate with Japanese luminaries such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Cornelius – who has proclaimed her a genius – as well as American sound artist Taylor Deupree and Canadian singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco.

Her latest album, Luminescent Creatures, is full of the wide-screen imagination of her best work, drawing listeners into the comfort blanket of her evocative soundworld. “I grew up watching a lot of [Studio] Ghibli movies and my mother worked with Disney”, she recalls when asked about her formative influences. “It was a part of everyday life and an integral part of my childhood – that very Disney ethos of finding magic in the little moments and of using your imagination. That’s a big part of what shaped my aesthetic and worldview.”

Another important influence was her mentor, the Japanese singer-songwriter Anmi Yamada. After attending several of his concerts, they struck up a friendship and she set herself the task of learning the complex classical guitar of his songs. Impressed with her playing, the musician began encouraging Aoba to write her own music, which eventually saw release. For an artist now so palpably confident and in control of her craft, it’s a surprise to learn how low-key her initial recordings were. “With the first album, I didn’t really want to have it out there. It was just that other people were pushing me to put out some music. So, I put out these songs that I had written over the course of a few years and put it out almost as a compilation. The second album was very similar. I was maybe a little more open, but I wasn’t interested in the music industry. It was really just songs that had been born in my day-to-day life.”

After refining her craft on subsequent LPs like 0 (2013) and qp (2018) she released Windswept Adan, her breakthrough effort. Envisioned as a soundtrack for a film set on Adan, a fictional island based on the Ryukyu archipelago, she expanded her sound from the classical guitar and vocal arrangements of previous works. Collaborating closely with arranger Taro Umebayashi and creative director Kodai Kobayashi (whose photographs helped visually realise the island) the music married Aoba’s bossa-inflected guitar and delicate vocals with lush strings, field recordings and ambient elements. The result was an evocative vision of imagined landscapes. She explains her change in direction: “In a lot of the songs that I’d previously made with just my guitar I’d always felt that there were other sounds and other instruments there, but I’d never been able to express them as music of a physical sound. When I met Taro I felt like I was finally able to work with somebody else to express those sounds and start to have them be noticeable in the music. I shared more and more of the sounds that I heard in my head with Taro and we began working very closely together.”

Reuniting with Umebayashi and Kobayashi once more, she’s further refined her vision on Luminescent Creatures, employing a similar creative process to fashion a luminous musical suite imbued with ruminations on nature, ancestry and communication. “The inspiration was deeply connected with Windswept Adan. It was borne from there”, she says. “While I was making that album, I was diving in the ocean with just the breath in my lungs, swimming with whales and listening to them sing. I would dive in some very deep places offshore, where it was so deep that you couldn’t see the bottom of the ocean. While down there I would see these creatures glimmering in seven different colours, flashing their light deep in the water. When I saw them, I began to think that this might have been the first form of communication. The decision to shine that form of light, or, if you will, luminescence. Maybe that was the beginning of everything.”

Taking that as a starting point she began to develop the idea creatively, putting the field research that she had been conducting on her frequent visits to Japan’s Ryukyu archipelago to wider use. “While I was still having these very raw feelings from diving, I was already filming or shooting photographs with Kodai Kobayashi. We would go and take pictures of the sea and coral reefs. From there I would share those photographs with Taro who would then collaborate with me to make musical ideas and translate them into music. At times we would do the opposite where I would make demos or music with Taro and then share those with Kodai, who would then try to find photographs that would work well or lean into the strengths of the music. That’s how the album in its early stages was made.”

Further inspiration came via her stay on the southern island of Hateruma. “For two years I participated in a Shinto [religion originating in Japan] festival there. In Japan, it falls during the season of Kyu-Bon which is a Japanese holiday in the traditional lunar calendar. During that holiday it’s said that the souls of our ancestors return and we welcome them back by dancing and singing and offering them food and drink. At that festival, I was playing the sanshin (a three-stringed traditional Japanese instrument) or I would sing songs that have been passed down through the generations of people on that island. Fragments of that culture and festival are apparent in Luminescent Creatures and they’ve become parts of the songs on the album.”

Those fragments are at their most pronounced on ‘24° 03’ 27.0” N, 123° 47’ 07.5” E’, which features a folk song she learned by participating in the traditional ceremonies. “That was the first song I learned. And I remember the dance very clearly… it’s never left my body and I’ve never forgotten it in any way. But this is the first time that I’ve had min’yō [Japanese folk music] be so directly apparent in my music. And to be specific this isn’t just Japanese folk music it’s the music of the Yaeyama area of the Ryukyu Islands. But I really think that min’yō, sort of subconsciously, has affected not just my music but even the big pop songs of today. And that’s because the sort of songs that people’s mothers, grandmothers or great-grandmothers would sing – these songs that have been sung forever and passed down – they’ve remained with us and become almost an integral part of the Japanese musical DNA.”

Much of the material on the album conjures up the sub-aquatic worlds that inspired its creation; on opener ‘COLORATURA’ strings, flute and piano rise and fall like waves; ‘pirsomnia’’s echoed skittering synths sound like they were transmitted from the depths of the sea. Above it all floats Aoba’s delicate vocals – calming, intimate and hypnotic. ‘Inside each of us there is a place for our stars to sleep’, she sings, referencing her central theory of bioluminescence on ‘Luciférine’ over a lush backing of gentle, sonar-like beeps and sweeping strings.

She’s keen to point out that Luminescent Creatures is a more thematically open-ended work than its story-driven predecessor: “The big difference is that with Windswept Adan there was a clearly defined plot whereas with this album there wasn’t. Where Windswept Adan just had one protagonist, this young girl, Luminescent Creatures can really be applied to any living being and anybody can be the protagonist of this story. I wanted to depict not just necessarily my fascination with the ocean, with luminescent creatures or coral reefs but really with life itself. How we live in the now, how people communicate and resonate with one another.”

As part of the album’s rollout, Aoba will be embarking on a major world tour including dates in the UK, Europe and North America. Her concerts offer another essential window into her wide-ranging art, combining her magnetic presence with an intuitive approach to stagecraft. “I’ve performed in a lot of different capacities, not just as a musician but also as an actor in theatre”, she explains, “so I don’t necessarily think of my shows as being pure music. But to really boil it down I simply just want one person to go home happy. There are really not so many things that I can do to make that happen. It’s not about a pure form of expression. It’s not ego. It’s really about finding the places that are broken or for example finding people that can’t see well and helping them have a better experience. By keeping that in mind, my concerts end up being very open. I’m a musician but I think of myself as being a little bit like a stage manager as well, where I’m able to look at everything and make sure that everyone is having as good a time as possible.”